


Weapon of Choice

by shadowen



Series: Line of Sight [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Established Relationship, M/M, Romance, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowen/pseuds/shadowen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best laid plans don't count for much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here it is, a day early. Enjoy!

Phil liked to have a plan. He liked strategies, contingencies, lines of approach, points of ingress, and a definite final goal. Plans fostered confidence, reduced losses, and kept the mission clear when things went wrong.

After a year, he’d learned that the very best laid plans tended to fly straight out the window when Clint was involved.

Clint himself also had a tendency to go flying out windows, but that was a different issue entirely.

So Phil decided to play it by ear, wait for the right moment. Clint hated surprises, but after a year, Phil had learned that, sometimes, surprise was the only way to keep him from bolting.

The moment Phil chose, of course, turned out to be entirely the wrong moment, but it seemed reasonable at the time. They’d been called in for a briefing and were making their way through the base, approaching the elevator, and they would have two to four minutes of relative privacy. Casually, he said, “There’s something I’d like to discuss.”

Clint gave him a sheepish look. “Yeah, about that. I swear I’ll clean out the washing machine. I really had no idea dirt could gunk up like that.”

“First of all, that was irradiated river clay, and I don’t know why you didn’t give that shirt to the containment team,” Phil replied, unfazed. “Second, I already requisitioned a new washer, so don’t worry about it. Third, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

“Oh, okay,” Clint said, looking at him curiously. “What’s up?”

If he thought about it, if he let the question pause in his mouth, he’d never get it out. So Phil took a breath and said, “I’d like you to move in with me.”

Clinked blinked. “Move in with you?”

“Yes.”

“As in live with you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

That brought Phil up short. “What do you mean ‘why’?”

“I mean _why_?” Clint said, frowning. “Why the hell would you want me to live with you?”

Phil could have sworn he heard the sound of breaking glass as this plan, like so many before it, was neatly and thoroughly defenestrated. “Well, we have been... involved for about a year, and cohabitation is a natural progression for most adult relationships.”

The elevator opened onto the administrative sublevel, and Clint strolled out with a familiar forced swagger that set warning lights flashing in Phil’s head. “So it’s what?” Clint asked. “Just something we’re supposed to do?”

“That, and most of what you own is at my apartment, already,” Phil answered, and the tightening of Clint’s jaw told him that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

“I can get my stuff, if it’s in your way.”

“It’s not in my way,” Phil sighed. “I understand if you’re not ready, I just….”

“Wait, is this, like, a commitment thing?” Clint asked suspiciously.

The impulse to simultaneously kiss Clint stupid and bang his own head against the wall was one with which Phil had become well acquainted. “There is a certain amount of commitment implied, yes.” Clint shoved his hands in his pockets and didn’t answer, and Phil said patiently, “You don’t have to make a decision right now, if you need to think about it.”

An inexplicable flicker of disappointment crossed Clint’s face. “So it would be later. Not for now.”

Phil had the sense that he’d screwed something up, and he wasn’t entirely sure what. “Well, I….”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Fury’s voice came suddenly from behind them. “You’re a goddamn dream team in the field, but anywhere else it’s like watching preschoolers write sonnets.” He pushed past them and opened the door of his office. To Clint, he said, “Live-in boyfriend means more sex. Everybody wins.”

“Oh, so that’s what it is.” Clint gave Phil a grin that was a shade less than genuine. “You just want easier access to my ass.”

Phil jabbed a finger in Fury’s direction. “Don’t listen to him. That man is deranged. No disrespect, sir.”

Fury just laughed and ushered them into the office. “As fascinated as I am by your little domestic drama, we’ve got a slightly more pressing situation to deal with.” He sat, handing Phil a thin, black folder. There was no label, no markings, nothing but a few printed pages that Phil thought might raise Clint’s clearance level just being in the same room.

Clint read over his shoulder, his breath soft and warm on Phil’s neck. “Holy shit. This looks pretty bad, sir.”

The file detailed the clean-up on a SHIELD operations site in Beirut that had gone dark a month before. A retrieval team found the location untouched and the ops crew dead, most of them stabbed or poisoned with chilling efficiency. There was little sign of struggle, nothing damaged except the security records, and nothing taken except….

Phil looked up at Fury. “Do we know how many active operation files were on the drive?”

“Twelve,” Fury replied grimly, “eight of which have agents embedded in hostile enclaves.”

“How many agents?” Clint asked.

Fury’s face hardened, and he answered, “Forty-seven, altogether.”

Clint swore quietly, and Phil’s stomach clenched. Forty-seven agents who might soon be in mortal danger, and they would never see it coming. “How long would it take to extract them?” Phil asked.

“Too long.”

“We can get some of them. Or we can warn them,” Clint insisted. “We gotta try, at least.”

Fury shook his head. “We don’t have the time or the resources to even _begin_ extracting forty-seven agents out of active missions. The drive has to be secured before those ops get blown.”

Sitwell was on mission control in Tel Aviv. Morse was undercover in Cairo. There was a recon team in Kuwait City. Phil didn’t know all forty-seven, but he knew enough to feel the threat of their loss looming. Fury should have been scrambling recovery troops, sending agents to every contact in the region. Instead, he was briefing one level seven agent and a black ops sniper.

“Who has the drive, sir?”

Fury held up his hand, and Phil returned the file. He took his time putting it away and folded his hands on the desk. “Natalia Romanova.”

“No fucking way.” Clint’s grin was sharp and wicked. “We’re going after the Black Widow?”

Fury gave him a bemused look, then said to Phil, “Anybody ever tell you you’ve got terrible taste in men?”

“He seduced me, sir,” Phil said dryly. “I never stood a chance.”

“Well, don’t try that shit with Romanova,” Fury told Clint. “She’ll eat your country ass for breakfast. We have confirmation that she’s in Calais and solid intel that she has a meet scheduled in London in three days, presumably to sell the drive.”

“That’s not a lot of time, sir,” Phil pointed out, but he could already see the wheels turning in Clint’s head.

“No, it’s not,” Fury agreed. “That’s why I need you two. You can move fast, adapt, and stay on the drive if it moves.” He stood and fixed each of them with a hard look. “You’ve got skills, and you’ve got some serious fucking balls. I’ve got a lot of good agents, but I need my dream team on this.”

Phil met Clint’s eye, and he saw everything he expected to find, every bit of the trust and determination that he looked for at night and in the morning and on every mission for the last year. As long as he found that, Phil had learned, he didn’t need a plan.

“In that case, sir, I think we’d better get moving.”

***

SHIELD’s file on Natalia Alianovna Romanova, a.k.a. The Black Widow, a.k.a. insert generic alias here, was long, classified, and disappointingly vague. She was Russian, they thought, trained by the KGB, they were pretty sure, and had black hair, maybe. The only thing they were absolutely certain of was her name, which was useless since there was no record of anyone of that name born in Russia in the last fifty years.

Clint had a long, vague file of his own, though, and he knew enough to read between the lines.

_April, 1978: codename ‘Black Widow’ tied to Romanova, confirmed. Estimated age at time of report: 8 years._

“Find something?”

Clint looked up to find Phil watching him with a faint smile. In the interest of expediency and discretion, they’d been afforded a private plane from New York to London, and the two of them had the small, plush cabin to themselves.

“You’ve been glaring at that file since take-off,” Phil said. “Did you find anything useful?”

Clint shrugged. “I don’t know about _useful_ , but it’s pretty interesting.”

“Oh?”

He said it the way he did when Clint made casual references to his childhood, gently inviting, questioning but never pressing, giving Clint the option to answer or evade as he liked. It was a card laid on the table, and it was Clint’s choice whether to pick it up.

Clint set down the tablet and said, “I was just thinking, y’know, if things had been different, you could’ve been chasing me, right now.”

Phil’s brows went up, surprised. “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, I guess….” Clint rubbed at the back of his neck. “The choices I made, I wound up at SHIELD, wound up here, with you. Different life, different choices, who’s to say I wouldn’t have ended up like her?”

“A notorious assassin being hunted for stealing intelligence that could put hundreds of lives at risk?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“It’s a little hard to picture, to be honest.” Phil sounded skeptical, but he was looking at Clint with a clear, curious expression.

“Why?” Clint asked. “I’ve got the skills, could’ve used the money. The only reason I never did it was because people asked, and I said no.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Phil admitted, frowning, and Clint wondered reflexively if this was going to be the thing that finally did it. Every time Clint gave up some broken, tarnished piece of himself, he automatically steeled his heart in case this would be the moment Phil decided that he wasn’t worth the trouble, after all. It happened less, now, but he still felt like holding his breath until Phil asked, “So what do you think made the difference? What choice brought you here instead of there?”

“I didn’t wanna be a bad guy,” Clint replied simply. “I mean, I’m not dumb enough to think I’ll ever be a hero, but….” He glanced at Phil and decided that no, today wouldn’t be the day he got thrown out on his ass. “I’ve done a lot of bad things. Like, a lot of just really awful shit. You know that. I’m not a good person, but I wanna _do_ good, to make up for… well, maybe not all, but at least some of those bad things. When my life gets put on the scales, I want the sides to come up even. God might not call that a win, but I do.”

He knew Phil’s eyes were on him, but Clint just studied his hands and scratched absently at the table with his fingernail. After a moment, Phil said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you’ll be held accountable by a higher power, but, if you were, you would do much better than come up even.”

Clint snorted and gave him a grin, willing away the heat that crept up his neck. “I think you might be a little biased, but thanks for saying.”

Phil hummed in the way that meant he thought Clint was full of shit, but he let it drop. “Once we hit the ground in London, time will be short. Intel says the buyer is a British national, but that’s not a lot to go on.”

“The buyer won’t set the location, the Widow will.” Clint said. “She’s got the leverage, so she’ll make them come to her.”

“Someplace small, contained, harder to bring in backup,” Phil agreed. “No more than two ways in or out. We’re looking for a bar, café, or restaurant. Somewhere upscale, probably in a business district.” He picked up the tablet and began tapping commands. “She’ll want to be near a transit hub, in case something goes wrong. A train station, probably. Helipad, rivers, parks, anywhere she can hide or have transport waiting.” Clint craned his neck to see the screen and watched Phil focus the map on a square of city blocks surrounding a large station. “I would guess somewhere in this area, though we might search a little wider.” Clint hummed, a fair imitation of the sound Phil made, and Phil glanced up at him. “What?”

Clint shook his head. “Nothing. You sure about this radius?”

“I think it’s a reasonable place to start,” Phil said. “Do you have a dissenting opinion, Agent Barton?”

Clint gave him a grin and picked up the tablet. “I think you’re wrong about the area,” he replied, studying the map and adjusting the view area. “History says she likes isolated locations. She likes theatricality, but she doesn’t wanna share her stage.” He zoomed in on a different district, decided against it, and selected another near the edge of the city. “She’ll want to stand out, not blend in, but still be able to hide, if she needs to.”

The map now showed a neighborhood of warehouses and industrial businesses ringed by housing estates, but a few features remained from Phil’s original choice. There were markers for an underground station and an on-ramp for whatever the British equivalent of an interstate was. He handed the tablet back to Phil.

Phil frowned. “You think she’ll let herself be exposed like that?”

“I think she’ll want her buyer to think she’s exposed,” Clint explained. “I think she’ll want them off kilter, in unfamiliar territory, worried about their car getting stolen or their suit getting dirty. The kind of people she deals with won’t be used to these kinds of neighborhoods. They’ll be so nervous about everything else, they won’t see the threat right in front of them.”

Phil looked over the map and started calling up building details. After a moment, he met Clint’s eye and asked, “What makes you think she’ll be used to this kind of neighborhood?”

“Where do you think crime happens? Buyers might have their snooty parties and fancy restaurants, but thieves have to get down in the gutter,” Clint answered. Phil held his gaze, unwavering, and Clint sighed. “Look, SHIELD may not have the details on who she is and where she came from, but it’s written all over that file. She was nothing, nobody. The KGB probably scooped her up out of whatever dumpster she was living in at the time.”

He could picture it a little too clearly: a scrawny scrap of a kid with eyes too big for her pale, dirty face, a man in nice clothes with a piece of bread in one hand and a gun in the other. Clint might have some personal experience with that kind of situation. Maybe.

Any other senior agent, Clint knew, would have questioned or berated him, would have wasted time tearing into his assumptions and accusing him of leaping to conclusions, but this was how they worked, him and Phil. Clint made the leap, and he trusted Phil to guide his landing. And if he didn’t always end on his feet, well, it wouldn’t be the first time Phil had carried him.

“We’ll need to recon the area,” Phil said. “This narrows our search, but unless we can establish an exact location....”

“Won’t be a problem,” Clint told him. “We just need to talk to the locals.”

Clint liked to think he had a certain degree of hapless charm, but, the truth was, most of the time he had no idea how to talk to people, especially normal people. Ordinary civilians who’d never had to steal or hide or listen to the awful, rattling sound a person made when they died, those people made Clint want to climb the nearest tree and wait for them to go away. He had no frame of reference for their lives, no common connection on which to build a conversation. Even most of the SHIELD recruits - hell, even Phil, sometimes - might have come from another planet as far as Clint’s ability to interact with them.

These kids, though, these three teenagers clustered around a derelict merry-go-round in the middle of a dusty park, these were his people, and they saw it, too.

“No, no, no, man. You don’t wanna go near them shacks,” one of them insisted, jerking his thumb toward the nearby hulks of concrete warehouses. “Renz and his mates run around in ‘em, use ‘em to stash things.”

The other boy smacked the side of his head. “Shut up, you fuckin’ twit.” To Clint, he said. “We don’t know nothin’, and, if we did, we ain’t dumb enough to tell the fuckin’ CIA.”

Clint laughed out loud. “Kid, do I look like the fucking CIA?”

The boy tilted his chin toward Phil, who was hanging back behind Clint. “He does. I watch the news. I know the fuckin’ Men in Black when I seen ‘em.”

“Not even,” put in a girl leaning at the center of the merry-go-round. “He’s a fuckin’ accountant or somethin’.”

“He’s a hard motherfucker, is what he is,” Clint told them plainly. “Don’t let the suit fool you. I’ve seen this asshole take down six Yakuza bodyguards with a goddamn pair of chopsticks.”

It was true, or true enough, and the kids’ eyes all went to Phil with looks of consideration and grudging respect. Phil played the part flawlessly, silent and still behind his dark glasses.

“Guns like that, you a hardmotherfucker, too?” asked the girl, her gaze sweeping over Clint’s arms. 

Clint gave her a grin. “This tough guy and his friends, where do they hang out?”

“Big red place right in the middle,” the first boy said. “Used to be a shoe factory or somethin’.”

“What you wanna go pickin’ a fight for?” the girl asked Clint with a sly smile. “Come party with us.”

She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but, of course, he’d been younger. He didn’t let his grin flicker for a moment. “Wish I could, gorgeous, but me and this asshole gotta go save the world.”

The girl rolled her eyes, and Clint heard the three of them laughing as he and Phil walked away. 

“The big red factory in the middle,” Phil said. “That’s unexpectedly specific.”

“Kids notice things,” Clint replied, shrugging, “especially kids like that.”

They found the building easily enough. Even weather-worn and neglected, its red face stood out from the row of blank, grey structures like blood spatter on stone. As they approached the dented steel door, Clint started talking loudly about real estate and business opportunities. Phil raised an eyebrow, then joined in at a more demure volume, and they cased the building under the guise of American entrepreneurs at odds over a property purchase.

Most of the machinery was still in place, but it had obviously been scavenged for saleable scrap and anything else of value. There would be plenty of cover in the event of a firefight and lots of sharp edges that might come in handy.

“It’ll cost a fortune to have all of this removed,” Phil announced dourly.

“Maybe we can repurpose it,” Clint replied brightly.

Graffiti covered every surface, from the cracked concrete floor to the vaulty steel ceiling, tags and slogans and a vibrant mural of a car exploding and slinging word-shaped shrapnel across the wall. That would put the stuffed-shirts even further off their game.

“It adds character!” Clint declared.

“It’s an eye-sore,” Phil countered.

The entire upper half of each wall was a series of plate glass windows, and dirty sunshine cast the entire, massive space into a strange glow. Lighting for dramatic effect, good lines of sight from other buildings, one broken window for last-ditch escape.

“Oh, now that’s beautiful,” Clint remarked.

“This place will be a nightmare to heat,” Phil replied.

They made a circuit of the perimeter, eyeing potential lookouts and weak points.

“This is hardly the best neighborhood,” Phil stated, and Clint followed his gaze to a small black box planted at the base of one window. There was another several windows down, and Clint was willing to bet there would be more.

“Fine. We can leave,” Clint said, heaving a dramatic sigh. “It’ll be at least a week before we can get back here.”

“If we’re lucky,” Phil muttered, and Clint rolled his eyes.

Once they were well away from anyone who might be watching or listening, Phil said, “Definitely the place.”

“Definitely the place,” Clint agreed

“We’ll grab our gear and come back tonight,” Phil went on. “The meet’s tomorrow, and we want to be ready.”

He had that look, that focused, determined look he got on missions. It was also the look he got working on jigsaw puzzles, and why in the name of all that was right and fair in the world would this man want to share a home with a loud, fucked up sonofabitch like Clint? 

Clint stamped firmly on that line of thought and swallowed the bitter doubt it raised on his tongue. He smiled to hide whatever expression his face was trying to make and said, teasing, “You’re so sexy when you have a plan.”

Phil returned the smile, warm and sincere, and a part of Clint felt like maybe he could be a person worth having, if Phil believed he was. He certainly wanted to be.

***

Even at night, the inside of the warehouse was close and stuffy. The metal walls held the heat of the departed sun, and there was nothing to stir the stale air. Phil and Clint had both stripped down to undershirts, trying to relieve the heat, and Clint was stretched out on the cool floor while Phil kept watch on the red factory through a broken window.

“Not exactly five star, is it?” Clint remarked.

Phil snorted. “It’s.... Well, it’s covered.”

“I think that’s part of the problem,” Clint groaned. “God, I would give my left nut for a breeze, right now.”

“Fine, but I’m laying claim to the right one,” Phil deadpanned, and he was rewarded with a quiet laugh.

They had to keep their voices down. Audio surveillance shouldn’t be able to pick them up from here, and the ambient sounds of the city would shield them from anyone walking past. Even so, better safe than sorry.

“Who am I kidding?” Clint said, rolling to his side. “You can have both of them. Nobody else would want them.”

Phil doubted that very much, but he gave Clint a smile. “Lucky me.” Turning his attention back to the window, he added mildly, “You never answered my question.”

He didn’t have to look over to know that Clint had tensed. He could hear the change in breathing, sense the shift in mood, and there was no mistaking the false ease when Clint replied, “What question?”

“About living together.” There were a thousand ways this conversation could go, and most of them ended in flames. “I don’t mean to press the issue, I just.... I suppose I want to be sure we’re on the same page.”

He heard the rustle as Clint sat up and imagined him rubbing the back of his neck, his brow furrowed. It was an expression Phil knew well. “I guess maybe we’re not,” Clint admitted. “It’s just that ‘normal’ doesn’t really work for... us. And I don’t want to do something just because it’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“I agree.” Phil gave him a glance, and found Clint watching him with sharp eyes. “I’m not asking because it’s customary. I’m asking because I want you to live with me, and because I want to live with you.”

“And see, that’s the part I don’t get,” Clint said, drumming his fingers nervously against his leg. “You’ve got your own space, your own life. You give up so much of it to everybody else, to the job and to... well, to me. Having me underfoot all the time would just cut into it even more. Seems like you wouldn’t have anything left.”

Phil blinked at him, stunned. “You think that I’m giving up something to be with you?”

“Well, sure.” Clint shrugged. “You could, I don’t know, watch your shows or read a book. Hell, you could _write_ a book if you weren’t babysitting me all the time. You get everything done twice as fast when I’m not bothering you.” He caught Phil’s look and added quickly, “I’m not saying I don’t think you want me around. I know you do. Don’t know why, but you do. It’s just that, y’know, you don’t have a lot that’s _yours_ , and I don’t get why you’d wanna cut it in half.”

“FIrst of all, please don’t ever refer to anything that I do with, for, or to you as ‘babysitting’. There’s enough differential in age and authority to make that unsettling.” The only illumination filtered in from the few street lights outside, casting Clint’s face in a dim glow, and Phil could see his eyes through the shadows. “Second....”

He paused. What he wanted was so clear in his head that he didn’t have words for it. The whole thing seemed so evident and so right, explaining it felt like arguing for the existence of gravity. Trying to tell Clint why he wanted this was like trying to tell oxygen why he needed it to breathe.

“Second, cutting something in half and sharing it aren’t the same thing.”

Clint’s mouth quirked up. “Uh, yeah, boss. That’s kind of how it works.”

“No, it’s not,” Phil told him sharply, and he flinched. “Nothing that I have is diminished by being shared with you. You make my life bigger, not smaller.” Phil shook his head. There was a time and a place for sentimental declarations, and a derelict warehouse in the middle of the night wasn’t it. “I don’t want to push you into something you don’t want or aren’t ready for,” he went on, “but there is a real chance that one or both of us won’t come home from this mission. There always is, on every mission, and I don’t want to waste time dithering about what I want. You’re right. I don’t have much that’s mine, but what I have is yours, is _ours_. My life is yours, and I want to share it with you.”

Clint was watching him with the sharp, bright gaze that made his heart beat just a fraction faster, and Phil swallowed against the dryness in his throat. Silence stretched just a second too far, then Clint said, “Does this mean I have to go grocery shopping with you? Because supermarkets still kind of freak me out.”

“That particular neurosis is between you and your psychiatrist,” Phil replied dryly, and Clint made a face.

“She’ll probably make me practice buying cereal,” he grumbled. “I don’t even like cereal.”

“You can get toaster waffles,” Phil pointed out.

Clint grinned. “See, this is why I love you.”

“My boundless optimism?”

“Yep. You’re just a ray of fucking sunshine.” He was still drumming his fingers against his leg, and Phil waited patiently. “So, um, this thing. Us. This is an all-in, long-term kind of situation.”

“It’s as much as you’re willing to give for as long as you want to,” Phil answered. “But yes. I’m all-in.”

Clint nodded. “I can live with that.” He stretched back out on the floor, tucking his tac jacket behind his head. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Wake me when it’s my turn.”

Phil took a moment to appreciate the line of his body at rest, sharp even in shadow. “So that’s a yes, then?”

“Yes, Coulson, that’s a yes,” Clint said. “It’s always yes.”

The rest of his watch passed without incident, quiet but for the sound of cars on the motorway and the soft syllables of Clint murmuring in his sleep - something he didn’t know he did and one of many reasons he could never be sent on deep cover missions. 

At midnight exactly, he woke Clint, and they traded places with a drowsy admonition to “actually get some fucking sleep and don’t just lay there worrying.”

Phil stretched out on the hard floor and muttered, “Yes, sir.” He didn’t need to see Clint’s grin to know that it was there.

At first light, they took up positions. Phil remained at the broken window, armed with a rifle and a scope that allowed him to see down into a corner of the red factory, while Clint sat in a blind on the opposite side. Between the two of them, they could see about half of the factory floor and had both the front and back covered.

“ _Motherfucker. It’s hotter than satan’s dick out here,_ ” Clint complained.

“Are you basing that comparison on first-hand knowledge?” Phil asked.

They didn’t know what time the meet would be or what the terms were, so they might be waiting a while. Once Romanova and her buyer arrived, step one would be observation to determine whether the drive was physically present. If it was, they would drop the targets, retrieve the drive, and report to the UK field office for debriefing. If it wasn’t, then observation would turn into surveillance until they found it.

Phil really hoped the drive was there, but he wasn’t holding his breath.

“ _Well, sure,_ ” Clint replied. “ _I’ve been jerking off the devil for years._ ”

“Lucky Lucifer,” Phil deadpanned, and Clint snorted. “Any other demonic exes I should know about?”

“ _Well, there was that one vampire_.”

“Charming.”

“ _No, really,_ ” Clint went on. “ _There was this goth chick in Detroit who was into the whole real-life-vampire thing. She wouldn’t drink, y’know, a lot of blood, but she’d open up these little nicks and just suck on them._ ”

Phil pictured fresh blood welling from a shallow cut on Clint’s throat and failed to see anything erotic about it. “Did you enjoy it?”

“ _Not really. I didn’t mind, but then she wanted to tie me up, so that killed it._ ”

A cursory and impromptu attempt at bondage had ended with Clint on the other side of the room in a panic and Phil nursing a split lip. Clint had a few hard boundaries, and Phil had found that one by running directly into it.

“I’d say I’m sorry to hear that, but....” 

“ _Yeah, yeah. Lucky you._ ”

Phil wiped away the drops of sweat collecting on his brow. It had started to drip down and collect in his eyelashes, casting a sparkling corona around his vision. Hot as it was in the relative shade of the building, he knew Clint must be sweltering on the rooftop. He tried to think of something to say, something pithy to keep them both chattering and distracted from the blazing heat and the tense misery of waiting.

He was opening his mouth, when Clint said suddenly, “ _Incoming._ ”

Phil pressed his face immediately to the window, scanning the area. “What do you see?”

“ _Six men approaching. No. Seven. Definitely packing._ ”

The group of figures strolled into Phil’s line of sight, and he used the scope to get a better look. Two men in the middle of the group were well-dressed: tailored suits, dark sunglasses, their shoes shining against the dusty ground. The other five appeared to be wearing tracksuits. Other than two baseball bats, he didn’t see any weapons.

“How do you know they’re armed?” he asked.

“ _The way they walk,_ ” Clint replied. “ _The two suits have shoulder holsters. Three of the minions have something shoved down the back of their pants. Guy in the back has his stuck in the front._ ”

Sure enough, Phil looked closer and could just make out the shape of a short pistol under the man’s waistband. “What about the other one?”

“ _Heavy muscle_ ,” Clint said, and Phil knew which one he meant. The man had a bat slung across his shoulders and a menacing ease to his gait. “ _He might not have a gun, but you best fucking believe he’s armed. He’s gonna be a problem, if we have to go in._ ”

“Cross your fingers,” Phil muttered. The entourage seemed excessive. A boss didn’t bring that kind of back-up to a business meeting unless he was afraid of something. “Any sign of Romanova?”

“ _Negative. You think she’s standing them up?_ ”

“That would certainly be a plot twist.” The men neared the front of the red factory, and one of the suits turned, presumably to give orders. Four of the minions broke away and took up positions at each corner. He was about to remark on the the one that remained, the heavy muscle, when something caught his eye, a flash of red through the window. He repositioned the scope just in time to see a woman inside the factory vanish behind a tower of machinery. 

“She’s already there,” he said. “Romanova’s inside the factory.”

“ _Bullshit. How? We’ve had eyes on that place since yesterday._ ”

“I don’t know how.” The three men entered through the front door. “It’s on.”

Through the high windows, Phil watched the men make their way across the factory floor. The remaining minion made a casual circuit of the inside perimeter while his bosses kept walking until all three of them were obscured behind the factory walls. Only then did Romanova appear from her hiding place, moving with a vicious grace. He could picture the scene inside as she materialized, startling her prey - and Phil had no doubt that was what they were. She would smile to put them at ease and make some polite, innocuous comment. Phil had spent enough time on both sides of these exchanges to know that her contacts would be thrown off, irritated, would want to get down to business, and she would be coy.

She stalked slowly toward them, and he knew they would become more unsettled the closer she came. Or maybe her contact was just an ordinary moron with too much money and would be charmed and captivated by her. Either way, she would get as close as she needed to until she was sure her prey was caught, and so Phil watched her walk across the concrete floor and right out of his line of sight.

Shit. “I’ve lost visual. Do you have eyes on the scene?”

“ _I’ve got Widow and muscle man,_ ” Clint answered. “ _The bosses are probably ten paces straight in front of her, but I don’t see them._ ”

Phil withdrew from the window and stood, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. “I’m changing position. Stay on Romanova and keep me updated.”

“ _You sure that’s a good idea, sir?_ ” Clint didn’t sound concerned, but just asking meant he didn’t like it.

Phil was already making his way to the warehouse floor. He’d have to get across to one of the other buildings to find a usable vantage point, which meant evading the minions standing guard. “If we take them down, it has to be fast. We need clear lines of sight on the major players.”

“ _Stay put,_ ” Clint said. “ _I’m more mobile than you are and, y’know, an actual sniper._ ”

“Negative. You’re too exposed already.” He went to the door beside the loading dock and eased it open, edging around the corner of the concrete platform to check the minions’ position. “Just keep eyes on and tell me what’s happening in there.”

There was a pause, as if Clint was thinking of arguing, but then he took a breath and said, “ _They’re talking. Romanova’s stone cold, but muscle man looks grouchy about something._ ”

The two men visible on this end of the building were milling idly around, hands in their pockets, looking very deliberately casual. They were moving about enough to keep their eyes scanning the perimeter without looking rigid or suspicious. Phil watched them tensely, waiting for a break in their surveillance. “The package?”

“ _Negative. Looks like they’re still negotiating. Or, uh, renegotiating._ ”

There was a split second in which both men were facing away at once, and Phil took it, dashing across the space to the next building, a long storage building with walls of aluminum siding that were hot against Phil’s back and threatened to rattle at his touch. He held his breath, listening hard for the sound of voices or footsteps or any sign that he’d been seen.

“ _Yeah, muscle man’s definitely giving her the stink eye,_ ” Clint went on. “ _Think maybe she doesn’t have the package on her, and she was supposed to._ ”

Phil didn’t risk answering for fear that the sound would carry back to the lookouts, and he began moving quickly along the side of the aluminum wall as Clint’s voice carried on quietly in his ear.

“ _Oh, oops. Romanova’s stepping back. Got her hands up. Somebody in there’s making threats, but I d- Oh shit._ ” His tone changed instantly to one of tight warning. “ _Boss, you’ve got incoming._ ”

Phil froze. He secured the rifle on his back and slowly pulled the handgun out of his shoulder holster, listening hard for any sound of approaching hostiles.

“ _Minion on my one o’clock is coming straight at you,_ ” Clint told him tensely. “The other one’s circling. They radioed the two on the back, and now they’re looking nervous. Sir, we’re blown.”

 _Not yet,_ Phil wanted to tell him. _We’re not made until they’ve seen us. I just need to stay hidden._ He couldn’t answer, couldn’t give the order. All he could do was stay down and think hard in Clint’s direction, _Come on, Barton, give me an exit._

“ _Jesus fucking...,_ ” Clint swore. “ _You’re boxed. They’ve got you on both sides. No exit._ ”

His voice was sharp and brittle, and it was Clint’s fear more than anything that made Phil’s stomach tighten. There was a small click, deafening beside his ear, as he flipped the safety off his gun.

Compared to gunfire, the arrow was a nearly silent weapon, but Phil was always surprised at how much noise it actually made. He heard the wet thump of metal punching through muscle and bone and the familiar shuffling thud of a body hitting the ground, and an outstretched hand flopped into the dirt from around the corner.

Phil whirled in the opposite direction just as the second man appeared. The loud crack of a single shot sounded as the man fired, and Phil put two bullets cleanly through his chest.

“This operation is blown,” he said, checking both bodies and pulling their guns and wallets. “Move out, Hawkeye. We’re done.”

He heard the whisper of fletching over the comm as Clint fired again. “ _Sir, the package is still wild. If we lose Black Widow now, we’ll never find it._ ”

“We can identify the buyer and track from there.” Phil edged back to the corner of the building, peering around. Clint’s last shot would have taken down a third guard, but where was the fourth? “This buys us time to secure our people. Now get out of there. That’s an order.”

“ _I can get a tracer on her,_ ” Clint insisted. Phil saw a flicker of movement on the far roof as Clint stepped out of his blind and took aim.

Phil’s heart stuttered. “Don’t you dare.”

“ _Forty-seven agents, sir. I can’t just let that go,_ ” Clint said, simple and calm. “ _Besides, there’s only four of them._ ”

“Clint, _don’t_ ,” Phil commanded, but the arrow was already loose. He didn’t see it’s path, but he could make out the end of the cord that trailed behind it, forming a link from Clint’s rooftop to the red factory. “Agent Barton, do not jump off that roof or so help me I will lock you in with the entire psych division and let them play roulette with your childhood traumas.”

“ _See now, that’s just mean,_ ” Clint said, and he jumped.

***

He fired once through the glass to weaken it, and the window exploded around him as Clint came crashing through. In that surreal moment of weightlessness as diving became falling, he thought of all the times Phil had told him, with varying degrees of ire, to stop jumping off of things. Depending on how the next few seconds went, this might actually be his last leap.

They were firing on him before he hit the ground, but Clint tucked into a roll and came up with an arrow drawn, sending it straight through muscle man’s left knee. The gunfire kept clattering over the howl of pain, and Clint kept moving. He saw Romanova, her weapon drawn, circling to his right, trying to divide his firing zone and get in close.

Good. All he needed was a few hits of hand-to-hand to get the tracer in place.

Clint stayed out of her line of fire, ducking under an assembly belt for cover. He fired an explosive arrow into the heavy joint of a machine in the far corner, counted three, and brought up his arms to shield his head as the blast sent heated shrapnel flying and brought the machinery down in a flaming tangle of steel.

Through the chaos, Clint could hear Phil’s voice in his ear. “ _What the hell is going on in there?_ ”

“Hold tight, sir. I’ve got this,” Clint answered.

He focused on the man in the suit. Take him out of play, then deal with Romanova. The man was scrambling back to his feet, gun still in hand, his fine suit scorched and dirtied.

Hadn’t there been another one?

Motion in his peripheral brought him around to see Romanova coming at him fast, a knife flashing in her fingers, her face cold and hard. Clint ducked and parried her first attack with his bow, slipping the tracer under his wristguard.

“Sorry to crash your party,” he said breathlessly. “Guess my invite got lost in the mail.”

To his surprise, her red mouth curved into something that might have been a smile. “It was a boring party, anyway.”

She swung, and Clint ducked right into a kick to the head. She went for another kick, and he sidestepped, giving her a jab in the gut with his bow and another with his elbow. He reached for her hair, but she caught his hand and twisted hard. He rolled with the twist and still felt a stab of pain in his elbow. 

Almost. Just a little closer.

“Glad I could liven things up.”

The look she gave him then was definitely a smile, and he was too busy watching for her next move to hear the soft footfall behind him.

Something sharp jabbed into the small of Clint’s back and white, blinding pain exploded up his spine, flashing behind his eyes like the after image of glaring light. Trailing behind the pain was an absolute, all-consuming numbness, and Clint didn’t feel himself crumple to the ground.

From somewhere else, he heard Phil calling. “ _Clint? Goddamnit, Barton. Answer me!_ ”

 _Shouldn’t’ve jumped,_ he thought stupidly. _Shouldn’t’ve jumped._

The next thing he felt was a hard slap across his face.

“I’m afraid we don’t have time to do this properly,” said a man’s voice in what was probably the most generic English accent Clint had ever heard. “So I need you, very quickly, to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.”

Clint forced his head up, still shaking with the aftershocks of electrocution, to meet the bland face of the man in charge. “What? You mean this isn’t the Steak ‘n’ Shake?”

In his ear, Phil muttered, “ _Jesus christ._ ”

The man smiled, so maybe he wasn’t completely without a sense of humor. Clint hated bad guys with a sense of humor. Without taking his bland eyes off of Clint, the man said mildly, “Mister Jones?”

The sharp stab came again, and this time the pain was worse, the electricity scraping over raw nerves, tearing apart his veins and scouring out his skin. He didn’t black out this time, and he saw the world tilt as he fell to the cold floor.

“ _Clint!_ ” Phil’s voice was tight and hard. “ _Hold on. I’m coming. Just hold on._ ”

“Once again,” the man said, his voice echoing and distant, like it was coming through clear water. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

Clint knew he was dead. They’d either shoot him now or drag him off, interrogate him, and kill him later. Even if Phil burst into the factory like the avenging angel of god himself, someone would put a bullet in Clint’s head before anyone knew which way was up. He thought of the small, messy apartment that was now half his, apparently, and decided to change his options.

Jerking his head weakly toward Romanova, he rasped, “Ask her.”

If she was surprised, it didn’t show. “Pitiful,” she scoffed, but the man in charge was looking at her with narrowed eyes.

“Drop your weapons, Miss Romanova,” he said, and there was a click as someone Clint couldn’t see chambered a bullet.

“You don’t believe this lunatic?” she protested, but she lowered her gun and knife to the ground, giving Clint a look so cold that it almost soothed the electricity still juddering around in his skin. “Why would I disrupt my own business meeting?”

“There are many whys and wherefores, at the moment, and I’m afraid I don’t have time to sort them out.” The man looked from Romanova to Clint, considering. He paused, looked harder, and reached for the tiny comm device in Clint’s ear. “Well, well. What have we here?”

He settled the device into his own ear, smiling, and said brightly, “Hello, there. Am I speaking to the man behind the curtain?”

Clint’s blood froze. There was a pause, and the man’s smile widened. He laughed as the corner of the factory behind him continued to burn.

“I’m sorry, the strategic what? ...Oh, well, that is a mouthful isn’t it. ...Yes, I see. Well, Agent.... I’m sorry, was it Cole? ...Yes, Coulson, of course. Agent Coulson, I have your man here, and he’s being terribly uncooperative.” The man gave Clint a bemused look. “Yes, he does seem quite the handful, what with crashing through windows and such. ...Mmhm. And, the Black Widow? ...Oh, you’d like her as well?” He flashed a wink at Romanova, and she scowled. “Yes, well, I hate to disappoint you, Agent Coulson, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut my losses. I will, however, give you the privilege of listening to both of them die.”

The man tossed the comm device to the ground in front of Clint and gestured vaguely toward Romanova. “Her first, then him. Make it loud.”

What happened next was largely a blur of gunfire and confusion. The unseen, obedient Mister Jones presumably made a move to execute Romanova and never got the chance. She stepped in quickly, and there was a loud, wet crack as his wrist snapped. Clint reacted on instinct, kicking backward and finding Jones’s kneecap with a satisfying crunch.

The man in charge raised his gun, and Clint rolled just as Romanova got a hold of the man’s arm. Clint pulled the knife hidden under his vest and jammed it into the man’s thigh. He fell to one knee with a cry, and Romanova took him down with a hard elbow to the face.

Then she turned her gun on Clint.

“Now hold on a minute!” he put up his hands, a slightly less peaceful gesture since he was holding his knife.

She spat something in Russian, and Clint didn’t figure it was a compliment. “SHIELD?” she asked. He nodded, and she spat again. “Idiot.”

And that would have been it. Clint could see it. That would have been the moment she pulled the trigger if muscle man hadn’t beaten her to it.

The shot rang out against the crashing, growing fire, and Romanova jerked back with a cry. Clint was moving a second later, flinging his little knife straight into muscle man’s eye. He turned back to see a dark, wet stain blooming across the shoulder of Romanova’s deep red dress. Between her dress, her lips, her coppery hair, and the bright blood, she was all red, he thought, like she was soaked in blood and just kept coming up one color.

“Come on,” he said, climbing to his feet. “We have to get out of here.”

He reached for her, and she jerked back, raising her gun in a trembling hand. “I’m getting out of here,” she told him acidly. “You’re going to burn.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “Seriously?”

She scowled, but her face was pale, her eyes dazed. “Don’t t- don’t touch m- ...” she trailed off, took a step, swayed, and tipped to the side. 

Clint caught her in his arms. His muscles still burned from the electricity, but she was small and light against him. He turned her head gently toward him to see if she was conscious, and he stopped dead as the barrel of her gun pressed into the underside of his jaw.

“You’re going to do exactly as I say, exactly how I say it,” she informed him. “Say yes and nothing else if you understand.”

Clint swallowed, feeling the hot rim of the barrel and the sharp point of its sight. “Yes.”

“Good. Now, very _very_ slowly pick me up.”

Moving by fractions, his muscles tight and sore, Clint eased one arm under the crook of her knees and lifted her up. She weighed almost nothing, and still she was so heavy.

Her voice was cold and hard, like the edge of a fine knife in snow. “Now let’s go. Back door. Walk quickly, but don’t run.”

Clint thought of the comm device on the ground, of Phil’s frantic voice in his ear, and he tried not to breathe in too much of the thick, oily smoke as he carried Romanova swiftly to the rear door.

“You took care of the guards outside?” she asked sharply. “Answer yes or no.”

The gun barrel seemed to dig harder into his skin, but Clint didn’t break stride. “Yes.”

He couldn’t see her smile, but he heard the shivering curl of it. “Good boy.”

“Fuck you,” he replied, and she made a sound of amusement.

The sun outside was blinding, and Clint didn’t wait for his eyes to adjust as he walked in a straight line away from the factory. He prayed for a glimpse of Phil waiting around a corner, for a calm, steady voice telling him to stop and turn around slowly. He prayed for a good old-fashioned Mexican stand-off, because then, at least, Romanova might be brought in or brought down.

Where the fuck was Phil?

“Stop,” she ordered when he reached the edge of the next row of buildings. “Back against the wall.”

“Bossy, bossy,” he muttered, and she ground the gun just a little harder into his skin.

She moved her free hand, and he heard the soft, muted click of a button being pressed.

The walls of the red factory exploded in a shower of brick and glass, and a blast of dry, scorching heat struck Clint’s face with a scouring of dust and ash.

“Alright.” Romanova shifted the gun so that it was hidden by her body, the end of it now resting evenly over Clint’s heart. “Walk.”

Clint forced a breath through the thick, dirty air and told himself not to pray for anything, because obviously his prayers weren’t getting heard today. He walked away with the fire of the ruined red factory blazing at his back.


	2. Chapter 2

The London field office was an unassuming townhouse on a long block of unassuming townhouses. The only hint that it might be anything other than a well-kept city home was a security pad embedded in the left gatepost, hidden by a sweep of green ivy. Phil touched an unmarked button, and the SHIELD crest appeared on the screen.

“Coulson, Philip J. Authentication victor india six one nine.”

The screen flashed once and returned to black, and there was a click as the iron gate opened. Phil pushed through it slowly. He refused to rush, refused to go barrelling into the office with his gun drawn and start shouting orders, even if some part of him insisted on doing exactly that.

A junior agent opened the front door, and the young man’s eyes widened in alarm at the sight of him. Phil knew he was a mess. His jacket was torn and covered in dirt and burns, one shoulder soaked in blood from a bullet graze, and buttoning it had done little to conceal the ash and blood on his white shirt. His tie was long gone, and he could hardly imagine what his face must look like.

The junior agent stood aside and let him in without a word. Phil didn’t think of Clint’s scream, muted and tinny over the comm, and didn’t shove the young man out of his way.

He hadn’t been to this office in years, but he knew where to find the person he was looking for. The junior agent might have started to call after him as he went up the stairs, but he was clearly smart enough to think better of that choice. 

Phil didn’t think of a calm voice saying _Her first, then him_ , and he didn’t take the stairs two at a time.

He went in without knocking, and the London director looked up sharply, ready to snap at whoever would dare. When she saw him, though, her face hardened, and she sat up straight.

“We’ll continue this later,” she told the agent standing in front of her in a crisp voice. “Send up doctor Cassidy, and keep everyone else out.” The agent gave a crisp nod and cast a curious glance at Phil as he left. Assistant Director Braddock nodded to a chair and said curtly, “Sit down before you faint, Coulson.”

Phil knew that the moment he allowed his muscles to relax, he would start shaking with exhaustion, and it would only be a matter of time before he shook himself apart. “I’d rather stand, thank you.”

“You’d rather do as you’re told, boy.” Braddock gave him a hard glare. “You’re in shock.”

He couldn’t feel his injuries. He knew they were there, but any pain from them was distant and unreal. “It’s possible, yes.”

She looked him over, considering, then said firmly and kindly, “Philip. Sit.” He did. “Good. Now tell me what the hell you’re doing in my office.”

He didn’t want to be. He wanted to be scouring the streets for signs of Clint. He wanted to find Romanova and put a bullet in her head. “We had a mission,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” She produced a bottle of mid-shelf vodka from her desk and offered it to him. He shook his head. “Retrieving a package, wasn’t it? Fury gave me the notice, but I didn’t think I’d be seeing you.”

“I didn’t think you would be, either,” he replied, honestly. “You shouldn’t have. Things went...” 

Braddock frowned. “What happened?”

“I screwed up,” he said, because none of this would have happened if he hadn’t been spotted, if he’d chosen a better vantage point, if he’d been more prepared, faster, better. “I screwed up, and we lost the target. The package is in the wind, and....” _Cllint_.

Phil had known Braddock for most of his life and all of his career, and she knew where his head was. “Where’s your partner, Philip?”

“He’s....” _Gone_. The doctor came in, took a long look at Phil, and huffed his disapproval as he gestured for Phil to take off his jacket. As Phil gingerly obeyed, he started again. “Our position was blown. My partner was trying to get a tracer onto the primary target. He was captured. His comm was destroyed.” The doctor began carefully cutting away the sleeves of Phil’s ruined shirt. “He was.... There was an explosion.” The once-white fabric peeled off slowly, and some flakes of burned skin went with it. The fire had been so hot, and Phil hated himself for not running into it to find Clint. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

Braddock’s eyes lingered on Phil’s scorched forearms before returning to his face. It must have looked bad, he thought. The doctor touched something icy and stinging to the wound, and Phil flinched. Sensation was returning, and with it the buzzing dizziness of aftershock.

“What do you need from me?” Braddock asked.

He wondered how far he would get if he asked for a nuclear device to send after Romanova. “I need a team. Three or four level six agents. People you trust. Good in the field. And I need easy access to resources. Surveillance, arms, transport, anything I might need.”

“Done,” Braddock answered immediately. “Though I’ll warn you we haven’t got much. I certainly don’t have four level six agents to spare.”

“Level five, then.” The pain in his arms was getting worse, and Phil found himself grinding his teeth. Pain could wait. All of it could wait. He had to keep it together. He had to find the drive. He wouldn’t let himself think about Clint.

Braddock nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.” She gave another nod to the doctor, and that was Phil’s only warning before he felt the sharp prick of a needle on his neck.

He would have sworn at Braddock, but he was too busy succumbing to the blessed black void where the violent burst of a red factory exploding didn’t smolder behind his eyes.

***

“This isn’t going to work.”

Clint had a sewing kit in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other, and Romanova was seated in the chair in front of him, stripped down to her underwear and pointing a gun at his head.

In the back of his mind, Clint reflected that this wasn’t the strangest situation he’d ever been in, not even close, and wondered what that said about his life.

Romanova scowled. “Can you do it or not?”

“Yes, I can do it,” he said. “But it’s going to hurt, and you’re going to flinch, and I _really_ don’t feel like getting shot, today. Especially by accident.”

“If you don’t shut up, you might get shot on purpose.”

Clint sighed. “Look, you have something I need, okay? And I need you alive to find it. Right now, I’ve got something you need, too. So it’s really in everybody’s best interest if I just patch you up without incident and we carry on with this little spy drama.”

She narrowed her green eyes, giving him a cold, searching look that made him feel like she was chipping at his brain with icicles. “It would be cleaner if you just kill me. Then the drive is safe, and you don’t put yourself at risk.”

“Pretty sure killing people is the opposite of clean,” Clint pointed out. “Besides, I don’t actually care about you. I care about the forty-seven agents whose names are on that drive, and I’m not stupid enough to think this’ll all go away if I just break your fucking neck. So for christ’s sake, put the gun down, and let me help you.”

He’d been wrong. They weren’t alike, not really. She was tougher, stronger, and she could take him apart with her little toe, if she wanted to. Clint just really hoped she didn’t want to.

Slowly, her eyes still fixed on Clint, she laid the gun carefully on the table with the barrel pointed toward him, leaving her hand resting lightly on top of it. “Better?”

“Better.” Clint set the sewing kit very deliberately next to the gun and unscrewed the bottle of alcohol. 

It took twenty minutes to dig the bullet out of Romanova’s shoulder and another thirty to stitch the wound closed and bandage it. Romanova was pale and trembling, her skin covered in a sheen of sweat, but she never made a sound. The only sign she gave of pain was to grab suddenly at Clint’s vest and dig her fingers into the stiff fabric as he levered out the buried slug.

When it was done, Romanova slumped back in her chair, breathing hard, and Clint washed his hands in the sink before collapsing into the chair across from her.

“Well,” he said. “That was fun.”

Romanova didn’t even bother glaring at him. “There’s a bottle of vodka in the refrigerator.”

Clint was sore from the top of his head to the ends of his toes. There was blood on his clothes that wasn’t his and a little bit that was. His nerves were frayed and raw, edged with exhaustion and the certainty that he would be dead the moment Romanova decided he was no longer useful. He had no idea where Phil was, if he was alive, if he was looking for Clint or had given him up as lost. The last thing he wanted to do was get back up out of this fucking chair and get the Black Widow a goddamn bottle of vodka.

“Get it yourself,” he told her, and folded his arms on the table, resting his forehead on top of them.

He half expected her to just shoot him out of irritation, but, after a moment, there was a slow, soft shuffle as she stood and limped around him, leaning heavily on the table. Clint looked up at a loud thunk as she set a glass down in front of him and splashed an inadvisable amount of vodka into it. It was probably good liquor, but it just smelled like lighter fluid to Clint. He took a swallow, anyway, because he figured good manners were more important than his distaste for alcohol, just at the moment.

Romanova knocked hers back with a smooth motion and immediately refilled her glass. She tilted the bottle toward Clint, but he waved it off.

“I should kill you,” she said mildly, “but I’m grateful for your help. Leave now, and we’re even.”

He wanted to. He really did. Clint wanted nothing more than to walk out and find Phil and go the fuck home. He sighed. “No.”

Romanova raised one perfect brow. “No?”

“No,” he repeated. “I need that drive, and I’m not letting you out of my sight until I get it.” 

“Why? So you can bring it back to your masters for a nice pat on the head?”

Clint sat up in his chair and gave her a hard look. “So that the agents whose names are on it don’t get rounded up and shot.” Something like surprise flickered on Romanova’s face, and Clint pressed on. “I don’t actually give a fuck about you or you buyer or whatever. All I care about is protecting those agents.

She narrowed her eyes. “I really should kill you.”

“Yeah, probably,” he said, “but you’re not going to.”

If she looked amused, it was the amusement of a cat watching a canary beat at its cage. “What makes you so sure of that?”

“Because you need me,” he told her. “Because those guys were pissed at you before I crashed the party, and now they’ll be gunning for blood. Because, with the shape you’re in now, you’re gonna get exactly nowhere on your own.”

“And you’re going to help me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Clint sighed. “Because I need you, too. The only way I’m going to get that drive is if you take me to it, so, for now, you’re stuck with me.”

Her expression didn’t change, but he saw the shift in her eyes as she went from amused to calculating. “Wouldn’t it be faster to just torture it out of me? Like you said, I’m pretty helpless, right now.”

“If you’re helpless, I’m a goat,” Clint said, “and I’m sure not chewing your trash.” The corner of her mouth twitched like maybe, just maybe, she was holding back a laugh. “Of course, if you’d rather go the torture route, I can always call m-”

She had the gun trained on him before he could blink. “You’re not calling anyone.”

Clint raised his hands slowly and said carefully, “I need to contact my partner, but there’s no reason to involve anyone else.” She didn’t need to know that no one else was involved to begin with.

“Your partner.” Her mouth twitched again. “The man behind the curtain.”

“That’s him.”

“No.”

“I just need to make sure he’s alright,” Clint insisted. “I need to let him know _I’m_ alright.”

“No,” Romanova repeated coldly. “If you want the drive, you come alone. No contact.”

Clint frowned. The last of the adrenaline and sharp ache had drained away and left him with a sick sense of worry twisting in his stomach. He had no idea what had happened to Phil, and that unknowing was poison inside him. But it was his worry against the lives of forty-seven agents.

“Fine,” he said, “but you’re gonna put that gun away and quit looking at me like you’re wondering how I’d taste with ketchup.”

She arched an eyebrow, but she lowered the gun. “If you even think about c-”

“Yeah, yeah. I screw up, you’ll kill me. You screw up, I’ll kill you. I think we can skip the threatening part of the negotiation.”

The look she gave him suggested she was deciding between slitting his throat or keeping him as a pet. Apparently, she settled on the latter. “Stand up.”

Clint didn’t want to stand up. He wanted to lay down and sleep for the next several days, but arguing didn’t seem like a wise course of action. Once he was standing, albeit unsteadily, Romanova gestured toward a rumpled twin bed in the corner. “There’s a bag under there. Bring it here and don’t open it.”

He obeyed, aching with every step. The bag was heavy, and it gave a loud rattle as he dropped it onto the table in front of her.

“Open the side pocket.”

Clint pulled the short zipper and caught sight of what was inside. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Romanova gave him a thin, wicked smile. “Take them out.”

Clint sighed and dutifully produced a set of steel handcuffs that had clearly seen a lot of rather unpleasant use. The cold touch of them threatened to pull a shudder up from the pit of his stomach, and he clenched his jaw hard.

“Sit on the floor at the foot of the bed and cuff yourself to the bedframe, hands behind you.”

“This really isn’t n-”

“Do it,” she commanded, and it was all Clint could do not to throw down the cuffs and walk out, the mission and SHIELD be damned.

Forty-seven agents, he reminded himself. Forty-seven lives against his.

Clint walked back to the bed and sat on the floor, looping the cuffs through the crossbar and slipping the cold metal rings snug around his wrists. He forced himself to breathe slowly, deeply, fighting down the certainty that he was going to vomit. Romanova must have seen some of the sickness in his face, but she didn’t comment, just checked that the cuffs were secure and that he wasn’t hiding any knives or pins.

He was, of course, and she pocketed them without a word.

Satisfied, she stood. “I’m going to shower. You should rest.”

She went into the bathroom, and Clint waited until he heard the sound of running water to let himself properly hyperventilate, gulping down panicked breaths and telling himself that it was fine, he was fine, he could get away if he needed to, it was just for now. He swallowed back the bile in his throat and wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into.

***

The interview room had a table and one chair, but the man wasn’t sitting in it. Instead, he huddled in the corner, knees drawn up to his chest, watching the door and the surveillance camera with wary tension. One side of his face was blackened with fresh bruises, and the tips of his fingers were wrapped in heavy white bandages.

Braddock looked from the screens to Phil, frowning. “What the hell did you do to him?”

Phil had never been of the take-no-prisoners school of combat. He preferred to take one prisoner, and this unfortunate young man, the fourth minion on guard, had been that one.

“I talked to him,” Phil replied. “He was uncooperative.”

Braddock gave him a look that he remembered well from youth. “Your father taught you better than that,” she said.

“My father taught me to do what’s necessary.” Braddock raised an eyebrow, and Phil shrugged. “I may have been slightly excessive.”

“Slightly,” she agreed. “But you got a name, at least.”

Elton Healey. An hour in a storage shed with a baseball bat and a broad-tipped arrow, and all Phil had gotten was a name he’d never heard.

“Healey’s small time,” Braddock told him. “He doesn’t have the resources or the connections to set up a meeting with the Black Widow, much less purchase anything she’s selling. If you want to find who’s backing him, you’ll have to catch a bigger fish than this one.”

“That will have to wait,” Phil said. “Right now, the priority is to secure the package and neutralize Romanova.”

“What about Barton?” Braddock asked. Phil had briefed her on the mission generals, but she knew much more than what he’d said.

He wasn’t thinking about Clint. He wasn’t thinking about screams and explosions and the two charred bodies SHIELD had recovered from the factory. He wasn’t thinking about how he would finish this if the dental comparison came back positive.

“Until presented with evidence to the contrary, I’m operating under the assumption that Agent Barton is alive and on-mission.” He caught Braddock’s look and said, as much to remind himself as anything, “Clint can take care of himself. If he’s got his sights on Romanova, she’s finished.”

Braddock nodded and didn’t ask again.

He was granted command access to all local resources, carte blanche to commandeer anything else he needed, a hotel suite to use as a base of operations, and two agents at his disposal. Phil didn’t know Sam Wilson beyond a personnel file submitted for consideration in the Avengers Initiative, but he was all too familiar with the nervous level four agent who trailed in behind Wilson.

“Agent Montoya.”

Montoya swallowed hard and nodded. “Sir.”

Phil didn’t give him the courtesy of a disdainful look. “I assume you’ve both been briefed?”

“As much as we’re cleared for, sir,” Wilson answered. “We seriously tracking the Black Widow?”

He wasn’t smiling, but Phil saw an echo Clint’s wicked grin, all the same. “That’s right,” he said, and Wilson gave a low whistle.

“Don’t suppose you can tell us what the package is?”

“I’m afraid not, but I can tell you that it will be small and mobile and that people will die if it we fail to retrieve it.” He paused, watching the gravity of the situation register on the agents’ faces. With a deep breath, he went on, “Securing the package is our top priority. Neutralizing Romanova is secondary, but, for the time being, she’s our best lead. Agent Wilson, I want you tracking any available surveillance to figure out where she’s been, where she is, and where she’s going. We’re going to find her and follow her for as long as we have to.” Wilson nodded, and Phil turned to Montoya. “We need more on the buyer. You’re going to tell me who Elton Healey is, who he’s connected to, and how the hell a fourth-tier thug gets a meeting with the Black Widow, and you’re going to tell me by the end of the day. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get to it.”

Wilson turned on his heel and went immediately to the makeshift workstation setup in the next room, shooting a curious glance at Montoya, who lingered. Phil walked slowly to the tacky hotel desk that had become his by default. He picked up a file, thinking to page through it and make Montoya sweat. It was the coroner’s report on the two burned bodies. He skimmed the first page, just enough to see that they’d been identified and to feel the the cold sickness in his stomach that told him he wasn’t quite ready to know for sure.

Phil set his face in a mask of cool indifference and looked up. “Was there something else, Agent Montoya?”

Montoya cleared his throat. “I, uh.... Sir, I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I just.... I want to say that I’m... for Agent Barton, wh- what happened with Park, for my part in it. Sir, I’m sorry.” He looked like he might vomit, and Phil hoped that his throat burned with bile and shame every time he thought of Clint. “I know that doesn’t mean much, but I am. It was sick and wrong, and I should’ve stopped it or reported it or something. I just.... I’m sorry.”

The fumbling apology hung in the air like the rancid smoke after a car crash, and Phil wondered if he had breath enough in him to clear it away. He decided that he didn’t. 

“You don’t owe me any remorse,” he told Montoya calmly, “and I’m not the one you should be asking for forgiveness. I might recommend prostrating yourself before Agent Barton and begging to know how you might atone for your sins, but you’re not fit to wallow in the dirt at his feet.” Phil turned away and walked around the desk with measured steps. “Now, I assume your statement of contrition is meant to indicate that your history will not influence how you conduct yourself in the course of this mission. While I appreciate the assurance, I can tell you without hesitation that, should any action or inaction on your part put Agent Barton’s safety at risk, I will shoot you in the heart.”

Montoya paled, and Phil stared him down coldly.

“Are we clear, Agent?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Good.” Phil sat deliberately in his chair and made a point of turning his attention back to the items on the desk. Montoya wisely took the dismissal and left. He wouldn’t be a problem.

Phil had taken the suite’s single bedroom as his office, and the two agents’ stations were set up in the small living area. The door stayed open between the two, and he could just see one of Wilson’s monitors scanning through CCTV footage with facial recognition software. He looked down and realized that the coroner’s report was still in his hand.

He had to read it, for the mission if nothing else. There had been five people in that factory, and he had to know which two of them had left behind charred and blackened corpses. There was no sense delaying. If one of the bodies was Clint’s....

If Clint was dead, then he was dead, and Phil would finish the mission, short one objective. If Clint was dead, then Phil would shut away whatever part of himself he needed until such time as he was able to cope with that loss, knowing such time might well be never. If Clint was dead, then leaving the file closed wouldn’t change that fact, only suspend Phil’s grief in a Schroedingerian limbo, both living and not, until he knew for sure.

He slid his thumb under the cover of the file and forced himself to breathe. 

The first page of the report contained preliminary forensic findings. Two bodies burned beyond recognition. Both male, thirties, white, evidence of multiple pre-mortem injuries, no significant physical markers. Cause of death not immediately discernible.

Phil read through the data twice, then a third time, just to be sure he wasn’t missing something, some crucial detail that would tell him whether the second page would kill him.

He wasn’t thinking about the small, spare room on base that he would have to clear out. He wasn’t thinking about what he would do to Romanova if his worst nightmare was realized.

He turned the page. On the second page of the report were two pictures of faces he didn’t know corresponding to names he’d never heard. Neither name was Clinton Francis Barton. Neither picture showed familiar blue eyes and a barely hidden smirk.

Phil set the file on the desk and allowed himself one, small moment in which to bury his face in his hands and breathe through the unbearable rush of relief, but the feeling that shifted in his chest was almost worse than the tension had been. These names and faces told him nothing more or less than that Clint hadn’t died in the factory, but neither had Romanova or Healey. One of them might have taken him. He might be captive, injured. His body might be soaking in the fetid water of a drainage canal or shredded into a thousand pieces that no one would ever find.

But he’d left the factory alive, and that was enough to go on.

Phil rubbed at his eyes and shook his head to clear it. The sooner this mission was resolved, the sooner he would find Clint, one way or another, and nothing so fragile as exhaustion or his own heart would stop him.

He looked back down to the file and read.

***

Romanova slept. Clint didn’t.

He was tired, aching, starving, his throat parched and sore, and the slight bite of steel around his wrists kept him awake through the long night.

He must have dozed sometime, because he woke with a violent start, smelling blood and smoke, with Phil’s voice screaming in his ears. After that, he played word games in his head to stay awake. Sleep was overrated, anyway.

Romanova rose before the sun and ignored him while she made coffee and ate breakfast. Clint was almost too tired to care, but the smell of dark coffee and toast overrode the burnt and bloodied odors that were stuck in his senses. When had he eaten? A day ago, at least. Probably more. His mouth was too dry to water.

“Don’t suppose I could get any of that?” he asked after a while.

Romanova was focused on a small computer in front of her. She sipped her coffee and didn’t look up.

Clint sighed. “Look, I get that you don’t trust me. I don’t trust you, either. But I’m not gonna be much good to either of us on an empty stomach.”

She kept sipping at her coffee and didn’t look up.

“I promise not to try and kill you with a piece of toast?”

Nothing. Not even a smile.

“Alright. Fine.” He leaned back against the bed as much as he could, stretching his legs out in front of him. His arms were cramped, and he moved his hands to keep circulation going. “You stuff your face. I’m gonna sit here and meditate.”

She drained her mug and closed the computer, standing. She pulled something small from an unseen pocket and tossed it at Clint’s head. It bounced off his nose, and he looked down to see the tiny key to the handcuffs sitting in his lap.

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” she said. “Do what you want in the meantime. If you’re not here when I get back, you won’t see me again.”

“Believe me when I say I’d love nothing more,” Clint replied, honestly. Forty-seven agents, he reminded himself. And Phil. “But I’ll be here.”

Romanova gave him an appraising look. “We’ll see,” she said, and the door closed quietly behind her.

It took longer than Clint would have liked to maneuver the key out of his lap and into his stiff, aching hands, but hearing that glorious click was worth every second. The moment the cuffs were off he let them fall to the ground, and he dashed to the bathroom and pissed for a solid minute.

There was still coffee in the pot and food on the counter, and he wolfed down as much as he could without getting sick, chasing it with cup after cup of tepid water from the tap.

He showered, scouring away the smell of smoke and the layer of ash from his skin, scrubbing the blood out of his hair and out from under his fingernails. There were no fresh clothes, so he slipped back into his dirty pants and undershirt, and then....

Then he looked at the door.

Romanova wasn’t back yet. There was still time for him to go, to run, contact SHIELD, get to the London field office, find Phil. 

_Phil._

There was no phone in the apartment. He could knock on doors, ask to borrow one. It would only take a second. Phil would have gotten help, would have a team working to clean things up and track Romanova and her buyer. They’d need to know that Clint was in the field. Every instinct he had was telling him to go; his whole being vibrated with the need to get back to Phil, back where he belonged.

Forty-seven agents.

He looked at the door and felt a cold sickness in his stomach as he sank into the flimsy kitchen chair.

And woke up with a jolt as icy water splashed down on his head.

Clint sputtered and leapt to his feet, blinking his eyes clear. Romanova stood to the side, holding an empty cup and wearing a smug expression.

“I’m sorry. Did I interrupt your nap?”

He shook his head hard, spattering the tiny kitchen - and Romanova - with water. “The fuck was that for?”

“Couldn’t resist,” she replied smoothly, setting a shopping bag on his empty chair. “Put these on.”

In the bag were jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, all used but reasonably clean and all in Clint’s size. “Is it my birthday, already?” he drawled, but Romanova ignored him. There were no actual partitions in this shitty little apartment and no door on the bathroom, so Clint went for broke and stripped down, changing clothes at the kitchen table. When he pulled his head through the fresh shirt, he found Romanova watching him with an unreadable look.

“Those bruises look nasty,” she remarked, with no hint as to how she felt about having caused most of them.

“Well, you’re welcome to kiss them better,” Clint said, leering, and she rolled her eyes.

“Get moving. We’re going to be cutting it close.”

Clint frowned, tugging on the well-worn sneakers. “Cutting what close for what?”

Romanova made a quick sweep of the apartment, meticulously collecting what few items were hers, including the handcuffs and key, and packed everything into the plain black bag. “You want the drive back?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then do as I say and don’t ask questions.”

“Fine. Jesus,” Clint grumbled. He noticed that Romanova was carrying the bag in her right hand, leaving the left in her pocket to take strain off of her injured shoulder. Clint nodded to it and said, “We should check that.”

“It’s fine.” She went to stand expectantly by the door as he stuffed his dirty clothes and boots into the shopping bag.

“Yeah, but you should st-”

“It’s fine,” she snapped. She opened the door with her left hand, and he saw her try to hide the grimace of pain. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Clint muttered, but he went anyway, wondering, not for the first time, why in the hell he’d thought this was a good idea.

She had a car tucked away on the next block, an unremarkable grey sedan with local plates and a ding on the rear bumper. It was the kind of car people thought of when they imagined the concept of “car”, the kind no one would notice. Romanova drove, tucking the black bag in easy reach behind her legs, and Clint slumped in the passenger seat, contemplating his poor choices and feeling the silence scratch at the back of his neck.

They headed up the ramp onto the interstate - They didn’t have states in England, though, so what the fuck was it called? - and drove south out of the city. Clint had a creeping suspicion that he knew where they were going, but he kept it to himself.

“I don’t guess you wanna put on some music?” Clint said, and Romanova ignored him. “Car games?” She gave him a look out of the corner of her eye, then turned her attention back to traffic. Clint sighed. “Fucking Black Widow. Figured you’d at least be _interesting_.”

She breathed out something that might have been a chuckle from a normal person. “Am I boring you?”

“Oh, not at all,” Clint replied flatly. “I love being trapped in silence with grumpy assassins.”

“I’m not an assassin.” She didn’t sound defensive, just like she was pointing out a fact. “And I’m not grumpy.”

“Alright, taciturn, then,” he said, and the corner of her mouth quirked.

“Taciturn,” she agreed. “To be fair, I’m not entirely sanguine about keeping company with an over-loquacious SHIELD lackey.”

Clint made a face. “See, now, I know you’re using those big words because you think I don’t understand, but I get it. Maybe I do talk too much, but I’m nobody’s lackey.”

She gave him a strange look, and said, “The fact that you genuinely believe that is both hilarious and tragic.”

Clint made an effort not to bristle. She didn’t know, didn’t understand, and had no reason to care. “I chose to be what I am. People can tell me what to do all they want, but I’m the one that’s gotta live with the shots I take.”

For a long moment, the car was quiet but for the hum of tires and the roar of traffic around them. Then, without looking at him, Romanova said, “I don’t know your name.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “You really think I’m gonna tell you that?”

“You know mine.”

“Everybody knows yours.”

“Even so.”

“Even so nothing. No dice.” Clint scooted down in the seat so that he could rest his head against the bac. “It’s not like my name would mean anything to you, anyway.”

“It would be better than ‘idiot’,” she pointed out.

Clint frowned. “Is that what you’ve been calling me in your head?” he asked, and she nodded. “Huh. I was expecting something much worse.”

“Oh?” She glanced at him. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something really gross and offensive in Russian,” he admitted. “I can live with ‘idiot’.”

Romanova gave him something that looked like it was trying to be a smile. “So no name?”

Clint sighed. “I tell you what. You can call me Hawkeye. How’s that?”

“Hawkeye?” she repeated, like she was tasting the syllables and wasn’t sure if she cared for them. “Why ‘Hawkeye’?”

“It’s a call sign, code name, whatever.” He met her abortive smile with a broad grin. “It’s the name I made for myself.”

“Hawkeye,” she said again, and it sounded like a new word that she was learning, saying it to make sure she got it right. “Alright. I can live with that.”

“Good,” Clint said, “‘cause that’s what you get.”

She looked like she might have had an answer for that, but she tensed suddenly, her eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. “We’re being followed.”

“Fuck.” Clint leaned over to find a good angle on his own mirror, and he saw it. A blue SUV, three cars back, weaving carefully to keep them in sight, crawling steadily closer through the highway traffic. “That’s not SHIELD.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

The SUV merged left, and now there were only two car lengths between them and Romanova’s little sedan.

“We can’t outrun them. Not in this traffic,” Clint said.

“No,” Romanova said, her voice calm, even as her hands tightened on the steering wheel. “But we can make them work to catch us.”

She jerked the wheel hard, sending their car careening across four lanes, and Clint gripped the door handle to keep from being tossed around. The SUV reacted immediately, swerving to follow, but the big vehicle was at a disadvantage in this kind of game.

The sedan’s course evened out, and it zipped ahead, finding every space in the long lines of cars. Their pursuers kept coming, but the shape of the SUV had begun to diminish slowly.

Maybe they could outrun them, after all, Clint thought. Maybe, for once, the losers would get lucky.

There was a deafening clatter of automatic gunfire, and the rear windshield exploded under a hail of bullets.

So much for luck.

***

“They recovered Barton’s bow and quiver.”

Phil looked up sharply as Braddock came in carrying a long, plastic evidence box. She set it on the bed and turned back to Phil with a curious look. “Why on earth doesn’t he use a proper weapon?”

Something twisted in Phil’s stomach, and he took his eyes deliberately off of the box. “Ask him.”

Braddock made a vague noise and crossed her arms, standing in front of Phil’s desk, studying him. “How are you, Philip?” she asked, and Phil sighed.

“If you’re asking out of kindness or concern, which I doubt, then I’ll be fine,” he said. “If you’re asking whether I have the objectivity and presence of mind to continue running this op, then, respectfully, fuck off.”

She narrowed her eyes. “There’s no need to get tetchy. I just want to be sure you’re prepared for all possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the very real chance that this entire foofarah may go even more belly-up than it already has,” she said. “That Healey’s people may find Romanova before we do. That they may find Barton before we do, or that they already have.”

Phil held her gaze and didn’t let her see the steadying breath he to take before answering, “Healey’s thugs will be easier to track than a world-class spy. Montoya’s getting names and statuses as we speak. In the unlikely event that they get to her first, we’ll be hard on their heels. With regard to Agent Barton....” His heart gave an unexpected shudder, and he paused. “I’m confident in his ability to evade capture and to... to withstand questioning should evasion fail.”

He wasn’t thinking about the sound of screaming over the comm in his ear. He wasn’t repeating Clint’s name-rank-number in his head.

“To be perfectly frank,” Braddock went on, pacing in front of his desk, “I’m more concerned that we’re the ones he’s evading.”

Phil blinked. “What do you mean by that?”

Braddock sighed. “I mean that we need to consider the possibility Barton’s gone rogue.”

He stared at her blankly. Of all the scenarios that had crept across the back of his mind, of all the potential devastations that had occurred to him, that had never been one.

“No.”

“Philip....”

“ _No._ ”

“You have to consider....”

“I’m not considering it, because it’s not possible,” Phil snapped. “It’s absurd.”

“Is it?” Braddock shot back. “Is it absurd that a good man might be taken in by a beautiful woman? He certainly wouldn’t be the first.”

“With respect, ma’am, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” Phil replied icily.

“Watch your tone, boy,” she warned. “Having faith in your man is well and good, but it’s clouding your judgment.”

Phil pushed back from his desk and stood, leaning forward to stare Braddock down. “ _Faith_ suggests that my conclusions are drawn without evidence. I _trust_ him.”

Braddock gave him a cold look. “And of course, you’re the one man on earth immune to betrayal.”

“Agent Coulson!” Wilson’s voice came suddenly from the other room. “Sir! We’ve got them!”

Phil’s heart thudded once in his throat, then he darted around the desk and was hard on Braddock’s heels to Wilson’s station. “Did you find Romanova?”

“No, sir,” Wilson said, indicating one of the screens. “I found Barton.”

The image was blurred, marked with the blocky timestamp of a traffic camera and zoomed in to focus on one face framed in a car window. The driver was obscured by a glare on the glass, but the passenger was clear.

Phil felt his whole body go cold.

“Where is this?” Braddock demanded.

“The M twenty, past Swanley.” Wilson pulled up a map on another screen, and a small, blue circle appeared on the line of the motorway. “Looks like he’s headed east.”

“Heading where?”

“Dover,” Phil said. “We had intel that Romanova was in Calais. Barton’s retracing her movements.”

“Clever boy,” Braddock muttered. “Of course, it’d be more clever if he let us know what he was up to,” she added, giving Phil a sideways glance.

“There’s someone with him. Staying silent may not be his choice,” Phil pointed out, and he wasn’t thinking about who might be driving that car or what they could have done to secure Clint’s cooperation.

The screens flickered from one view to another to another, tracking the car as it moved across the range of different cameras. Suddenly, there was a flash and a burst of movement, and the car swerved sharply, rocked by an unseen impact.

“Was that gunfire?” Montoya said, leaning forward.

Wilson backtracked the feed, even as the real-time images kept changing. “Sure was,” he confirmed. “Barton’s under fire.”

Something icy and hard and terrifying shot up Phil’s spine, turning his guts to acid and his mouth to ash. He shut it down, shut it away, and let a lifetime of training and experience take over.

“Alright. Montoya, call the office. Tell them to get law enforcement moving in and send a bird to pick us up.” Montoya, who had been standing by with a grim expression, nodded briskly and pulled out his phone. “Wilson, get your tracking set-up ready to move. I don’t want to blink and lose them.”

He was already in motion, securing his sidearm and opening the small weapons locker to collect ammunition. They would pursue, apprehend the assailants, secure their asset, and regroup. Standard procedure. Business as usual.

“I’ll be taking point on this, gentlemen.”

Phil snapped around to stare at Braddock. Even Montoya and Wilson paused uncertainly.

“I don’t think th-”

“It’s not up for argument,” Braddock cut him off. “The longer this mess goes on, the further up the creek we get. I’m not waiting for it to escalate any more than it has. Now let’s go.”

It was a few steps short of calling him out, but Phil’s face burned, nonetheless. The two agents sent him curious looks, but they went on about their orders. Phil, bit back the anger and impatience on his tongue and chambered a round in his spare gun.

By the time they were in the helicopter, with the motorway streaming below them, Phil had stopped watching Wilson’s screen as it tracked the chase. He tried to put away the knowledge that Clint was there, under fire and racing for his life, and to see only a blue SUV in pursuit of a grey sedan and the exchange of bullets. Still, with every flicker, his pulse rattled under his skin, and he kept wondering why the fuck the London office had sent the world’s slowest helicopter instead of a quinjet.

He saw the flashing lights of police cars, first, a trail of bright blues and red punctuating the chaos. Civilian vehicles were swerving onto the shoulders, piling into gridlocks as the chase cut a jagged tear through traffic. 

“ _Son of a bitch!_ ” Wilson said suddenly. “ _There’s another car!”_

Phil looked at the screen, but he didn’t need to. A black humvee was streaking past the pursuing police cars, flashes of gunfire at its windows. The side windows of one car burst, and it careened away, smashing into the cars stopped along the motorway.

Bile rose in Phil’s throat, but he choked it back.

“There!” Montoya called, pointing ahead to where the hulking blue SUV was still playing cat and mouse with the little grey sedan.

The rear window of the sedan was blown out, and Phil could see a figure braced in the empty space, firing back at the SUV, his blonde hair caught in the high wind. He ducked down into the backseat as the answering shots came.

The little car had no bulk, no power, and only one armed man. They would be run down in minutes.

“What’s the plan, here, ma’am?” Phil asked, and Braddock scowled.

“ _Take care of those thugs. Then we’ll deal with Barton._ ” The word _deal_ was sour in Phil’s ear, but Braddock went on, “ _Gentlemen, fire at will._ ”

Phil reached back and retrieved a heavy rifle from the rack, and he wasn’t thinking about how Clint would have rolled his eyes and called it an insult to projectile weaponry. He took aim, sighted through the scope, and fired.

The bullet punched through the windshield of the humvee. It jerked from one side to the other, then rolled on, picking up speed as it approached the other cars.

Phil took aim again, sighted, corrected, and....

“ _What the fuck?_ ”

He looked up at Montoya’s exclamation and saw as the grey sedan made a sharp turn off of the motorway and zoomed in the wrong direction down an on ramp.

Whoever was driving, Phil thought, they were good.

The helicopter veered, tracking over the ramp, but the pursuing cars were more unwieldy. One police car tried to make the same turn and smashed into the barrier wall, and two more cars piled onto it. The SUV scraped along the barrier, but somehow made the curve and stayed hot on the sedan.

Phil was so intent on the action, that he almost missed it, but movement caught the corner of his eye. He looked back to the Humvee to find the black barrel of something large and threatening angled out of one window and pointed toward the helicopter.

“Incoming!” he shouted, praying the pilot would have the good sense to get out of the goddamn way.

He raised the rifle, took aim, sighted, and fired.

Later, he would think that maybe he’d clipped the shooter, and that made the shot go wild. At the time, he didn’t really think it mattered.

The shot from the big gun tore into the helicopter’s rotor, and there was a screech of metal as the blades twisted. The helicopter pitched sideways, spinning out away from the road and over the countryside. It pitched again as the pilot tried to right it, and this time the motion sent Phil lurching against the side, his head slamming into the frame.

He saw blue sky and green fields orbiting each other in a swirl of color and smoke. His hands slipped from their hold, and he found himself swaying, fighting to stay steady as the earth and air crashed into each other and the helicopter spiralled toward the unforgiving ground. 

***

Clint watched the SHIELD helicopter barrel into the ground, and everything inside him became poison. He couldn’t breathe. He was choking on his own lungs, watching the rotary blades cut into into the rocky soil as the chopper spun and skidded sideways across the open field.

A spray of bullets punched into the trunk with a clatter, and Clint peeked over the back seat to see the blue SUV speeding down the ramp after them.

“Goddammit,” he swore and wished for the familiar grip of his bow instead of a stranger’s gun. “Get to the chopper!” he shouted to Romanova, and she gave him a look of disbelief in the rearview mirror.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“SHIELD’s not trying to kill us,” he said. “These guys seem to feel differently.”

“SHIELD’s not trying to kill _you_ ,” she shot back, and she had a point, there.

“It’ll be okay, just....” They wouldn’t shoot Romanova, not if Clint was with her. It was their best chance, and, if anyone was hurt, then.... “I have to make sure they’re alright.”

“You’re joking.”

“Natalia, _please_.”

Romanova spat something in Russian, and gave him another look in the mirror. With a deft twist, she spun the car completely around and slammed it into reverse. The force of the turn bowled Clint over, and he fell down between the seats as Romanova zoomed backward to the end of the ramp. A piece of fence post flew up through the shattered rear window as the sedan smashed through the barrier and into the field.

“Well that’s one way to get there,” Clint muttered. The car jostled over the uneven ground, still in reverse, and Clint raised his head in time to see the SUV crashing off the road after them.

Romanova angled around the back of the downed helicopter and skidded to a halt. Clint vaulted up through the rear window and climbed over the roof of the car. Bracing his feet on the hood and his backend on the windshield, he breathed in deep and took aim at the oncoming attack.

Five rounds left in this clip. Five targets. Everything around him slowed and vanished until there was only the tide of his breathing, the gun in his hands, and the target.

He breathed out and fired. _Bang._

Left front tire.

Inhale. Exhale. _Bang._

Right front tire.

Inhale. Exhale. _Bang._

Right rear tire.

Inhale. Exhale. _Bang._

Front passenger.

Inhale. Exhale. _Bang._

Driver.

The SUV swerved wildly, finally spinning hard and tipping onto its side. It rolled twice and came to a crashing halt, still and smoking, like a carcass to be burned on the field of battle.

Clint threw the gun back into the sedan and didn’t look at Romanova before he dashed around to where the helicopter’s side was open to the field and sky, praying to find a crew of irritated SHIELD agents and not....

Montoya was standing beside the fallen chopper next to a well-weathered woman that Clint didn’t know. Braced in the helicopter’s open side and reaching in to help someone out, his face streaked with ash and blood from a split brow, was Phil.

For one bright, perfect second, Clint felt human for the first time in two days.

“Barton?” Montoya managed to sound stunned, relieved, and terrified all at once, but it didn’t matter because his voice made Phil look up.

He saw Clint, and there it was, that unknown thing in his face that belonged to Clint alone. It was a flash, as fierce and temporary as a crashing wave, and it was all Clint needed to breathe properly again.

“Agent Barton, put your hands on your head and kneel down slowly,” the woman commanded, and Clint was startled to find that she was pointing a gun at him.

“I... what?” He took a step back. “What’s going on?”

“You disobeyed orders, abandoned your mission, and you’ve been AWOL for more than thirty-six hours,” she said coldly. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of espionage, conspiracy, and treason.”

“Wh- _treason_? Now hold on a minute.”

“Braddock, that’s enough,” Phil snapped, but his eyes were fixed on Clint.

The woman ignored him. “Who’s driving the car, Barton?” she asked, and her tone clearly said that she already knew.

The sound of police sirens got louder. Reinforcements were coming, and Clint didn’t have time for this. “Romanova,” he said, “but it’s n-”

“What?” The betrayal in Phil’s voice burned through Clint worse than Mr. Jones’s electric shocks.

“Hands on your head, Barton,” Braddock ordered. “ _Now._ ”

Forty-seven agents. If he gave in now, Romanova would vanish, and all this mess would be for nothing. Clint shook his head, backing away. “I can’t. I’m sorry. You have to trust me.”

Braddock’s gun was steady, the sight lined squarely with Clint’s head. “One more time, and then I will shoot you.” She matched Clint’s retreat with a slow advance. “Hands on your head.”

“Elizabeth, stop,” Phil told her. He looked like he was going to be sick, and he never took his eyes off Clint.

For the first time in his life, Clint wanted to follow orders. He wanted to kneel down and let them take him in and just be in the place where Phil was. But there were forty-seven lives on the line, and he had no time for this bullshit.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I’m sorry.”

He saw Braddock’s finger move, saw it curl around the trigger, and he braced his feet to dive for cover just as Phil leapt from the atop the helicopter and knocked Braddock to the ground.

“Go!” he shouted at Clint. Braddock caught him with an elbow in the mouth, but he kept a tight hold on the barrel of her gun. There was blood on his teeth as he yelled, “Dammit, Clint, _go_!”

Clint turned and sprinted for the car, feeling once again like his insides were poison and everything in him was trying to stop his breath.

Romanova was revving the engine, just starting to pull away as Clint tumbled into the passenger seat beside her. She didn’t say anything, just looked at his face and looked away as she hit the gas hard.

Clint put his head out the window, looking back as they went. He could see Phil and Braddock still locked together, and his heart pounded.

They’d arrest Phil for assaulting another agent. They’d court-martial him, take away his clearance, stick him at a desk. Or worse. Braddock could shoot him right there, and that would be it.

It was all Clint could do not to jump out of the car and go running back.

He saw Braddock hit Phil hard in the throat. He saw her wrest the gun away as Phil reeled back and saw her clock him across the head with it. Her saw her turn away from Phil and lift the gun. He saw Phil, bloodied and desperate, reach toward her.

He must have heard the shot, but the sound was lost.

He saw a flash of red, a flash of blinding pain, and then Clint saw nothing.


	3. Chapter 3

Everything in Phil’s head went white.

Later, he would remember that Braddock had pistol-whipped him again, that he had been led away stumbling in handcuffs, that doctor Cassidy had patched him up without a word, that he had been brought to this room. He wasn’t there for any of it, not really.

He was in the recoil of a gunshot and the sudden splatter of blood on the inside of the grey sedan. He was in the second after and the shattering understanding that he had lost everything in the pulse between one heartbeat and the next.

_Clint._

“Coulson.”

He blinked against the whiteness. Shut it down. Shut it away. He would have his whole life to grieve.

“Come on, Philip, snap out of it.”

He blinked again and saw Braddock standing at the door, watching him cautiously.

“I swear I will call your father if you don’t pull yourself together.”

Somewhere, behind all the things he was fighting to keep back, Phil thought that he should reply with something clever or snide. What came to his mouth was, “You shot him.”

Braddock sighed, though with relief or frustration he couldn’t tell. “I had to. I understand you’re upset b-”

“Upset?” he repeated, his voice flat. Even the rage searing his throat felt distant. “I’m not sure there’s a word for what I am, at the moment, but I’m certainly not _upset_.”

Braddock passed a hand over her face, and she looked so much older than Phil had ever seen her. “He was a rogue agent acting in accord with a dangerous target. I couldn’t let him escape.”

“So you shot him,” Phil said. “I asked you to trust him. I told you to stop. I loved him, and you shot him in the head.”

She had the guts to look him in the eye, but only for a moment. A brittle silence balanced between them, weighted with empty justifications and unwanted sympathy. Finally, she cleared her throat and said firmly, “I’ve contacted Director Fury. We’ll have transport for you soon.”

Phil would have frowned, but his face felt frozen. “Transport.”

“Back to New York,” Braddock said. “In light of... everything, it seems best that you head home. I’ve received a full brief from the director, so our branch can handle things from here.”

“Home?” _My life is yours, and I want to share it with you._ “No. I can’t.... I can’t just leave. There’s still....”

“It’s done, Coulson.” Braddock’s patience was clearly gone. She’d given him what compassion she had to spare. “I’m sorry, but it’s done. You’ve been compromised, and I think it’s best if you stand down and... and get some rest. Goodbye, Philip.”

She turned on her heel and left. The door didn’t slam behind her, but it still sounded like a gunshot in Phil’s ears.

_Clint._

He sat down on the cot against the wall, straight-backed, hands clasped in front of him. The bandages on his forearms pulled and itched. The room was small and stuffy, but he felt cold. Everything seemed to be set against a stark backdrop of white nothing, like a scene sketched in snow.

It was done. The operation was blown. Romanova would vanish. Healey’s people would be a dead end. It was over, and the cost would be forty-seven lives.

No. Forty-eight.

Phil let his head fall into his hands and fought back the freezing, horrible feeling trying to claw its way out of his chest. He was going to be sick.

There was a soft knock on the door. Phil breathed in to answer, but bile rose to his mouth instead of words. He swallowed it back and waited until the door cracked open and Montoya peered cautiously around it.

“Sir?”

Phil cleared his throat and sat up. Just a little while longer. He wasn’t done yet. “What is it, agent?”

Montoya slipped inside, a long plastic case under his arm, and shut the door behind him. “Sir, Assistant Director Braddock said they’re sending you back to base.”

No reaction. No feeling. Just the blank, professional face of a senior SHIELD agent. “That’s correct.”

Montoya nodded. “I know that y-....” He stopped, shaking his head. He seemed lost, uncertain, but he took a breath and said clearly, “They didn’t find a body.”

Phil’s heart, broken and cold, skittered in his chest. “What?”

“They won’t tell you, but they didn’t find a body,” Montoya said again. “If Barton was dead, Romanova would’ve.... She would’ve just tossed him out or left him. Search teams found the car, but no body.”

Through the consuming whiteness, Phil’s brain began spinning up to speed. “You’re sure.” Montoya nodded. “And the blood in the car?”

“I didn’t see it,” he said. “But a headshot from a handgun at that distance would’ve left the kind of mess people talk about, and no one’s talking.”

Car abandoned. Blood on the scene. No body. “He’s with Romanova,” Phil said. “He’s still on mission. He’s still....” _Alive._

It wasn’t done. Not yet.

“Anyway, sir, I thought you should know,” Montoya went on, setting the box on an empty chair. “It’s not much to go on, but I thought it would give you some peace of mind.” He took off his jacket, folded it over the back of the chair, and went back to the door. “Can I get you anything, sir?”

Phil looked from the box and the jacket to Montoya. “No, agent, I think you’ve done enough. Thank you.”

Montoya nodded and gave him a shadow of a smile. The door didn’t quite close behind him.

Phil didn’t give himself a chance to think. There was nothing to think about. 

Inside the box, encased in plastic bags and marked with designations and numbers, were Clint’s bow and quiver. Several arrows were gone and the bowstring had snapped, but the gear was otherwise intact. 

Phil’s breath shuddered in his throat. He swallowed it down and closed the box.

Damage and blood spatter had steadily deprived him of his own clothes, so he slipped on Montoya’s jacket over a borrowed undershirt and a pair of SHIELD-issue tac pants. The door eased open silently as he checked the hall and listened, breathless, for any sound of approach.

Voices in another hallway. Footsteps on the floor above. No one coming.

He knew the building well enough to make his escape quick and unseen, and, with the box under his arm and one star to guide him, Phil vanished into the gathering dark.

***

In his dream, Clint was burning. He was burning and screaming and no one came. Everyone else was ashes already.

There was a light touch on his face, and he woke suddenly, gripping Romanova’s wrist.

“It’s okay,” she soothed, her voice almost soft. “You’re alright. We’re safe.”

She was sitting beside him, her legs folded under her and her hip pressed against his bare side. They were on a rough blanket laid across something uneven and scratchy, lying on the floor of a.... Clint blinked and looked around, breathing in a familiar smell that made his aching head pound, and he recalled flashes from their trek to safety.

“Right. Barn,” he said hoarsely.

Romanova rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry. The Ritz was all booked up.”

Clint laid back on the blanket and let go of her arm. “Shoulda made reservations,” he mumbled.

She snorted and reached again to touch his face gently. “How’s your head?”

“Feels like I got shot in it,” he said. “Oh yeah. ‘Cause I did.”

She pulled up the edge of the bandage, and Clint winced. The bullet must have grazed him, which sounded so mild when the reality was that a lead projectile had ripped a gash across the side of his head while travelling at about a thousand miles per hour. He wasn’t dead, but, just at the moment, he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

“It could have been worse,” Romanova told him. “You’re lucky.”

Clint huffed. “Yeah. Lucky.”

Satisfied, she laid the bandage back and smoothed it down against his skin. Her fingers were cool, and he could feel the gun calluses on the edges. “I guess I was wrong about SHIELD not wanting to kill you,” she said, after a moment.

He thought of Phil, blood on his teeth, fighting to give Clint a chance. “They think I’ve turned on them.” He met Romanova’s eye. “They think I’m working with you.”

Something like a smile flickered on her red lips. “You _are_ working with me.”

Up close, she was shockingly, off-puttingly beautiful, and she looked tired. “Yeah,” Clint sighed. “Not one of my better ideas.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “You could have turned me in. That would have made things easier.”

“Yeah, maybe. Didn’t really think about it.” 

Romanova raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t think about it.”

“Not really.” Gingerly, Clint braced himself on his elbows and slowly pushed up into a sitting position. His head spun and throbbed, and he closed his eyes, taking deep breaths through his nose to keep from vomiting.

Romanova put a steadying hand on his shoulder, and said, disbelieving, “There was a gun pointed at you, and you never once thought to just hand me over and go home.”

“Honestly, no.” He could have done it, could have given in and given her up. He could have been in Phil’s arms that very moment, instead of bleeding in a barn with an armed and injured woman. “Now that you mention it, though, that might have been a good idea.”

“Too late,” she said. “No take-backs.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He cracked his eyes and found that she really was smiling, this time. “Anyway, we had a deal.”

The sharp edges of her face softened. “Yes, we did.”

He really should have seen it coming. He’d always been bad at anticipating that kind of thing, though, so he was caught completely off-guard when Romanova ducked her head and pressed her mouth against his. Through the post-concussion fog and the shock of her soft lips, Clint thought that it was a hell of a kiss. He felt it down in the soles of his feet, and he understood, then, why they called her the Black Widow.

“No.” He turned his head and pushed weakly at her shoulder. “No. Don’t do that.”

She blinked, and, just for a second, he saw the flash of calculation as she reconfigured her strategy. “What’s wrong?” she asked, and there was just enough genuine confusion in her face to make the whole thing seem real.

“What’s wrong is the kissing and the touching and the....” He gestured at her body, leaned in close to him. “Can you just back up a little? Please?”

She didn’t move. If anything, she edged in closer, frowning. “This won’t change our deal, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She smelled good, like skin and air and gunsmoke, and the ghost of her breath on his mouth made Clint’s stomach turn. “I just.... I want to trust you an-”

“Bullshit.”

She drew back, studying him. “What?”

“Bullshit,” he repeated. “You want to fuck me because then you think you’ll have me wrapped around your finger.”

The corners of her mouth hardened, just the slightest betrayal. “Excuse me?”

“Look, you can’t con a con, okay?” Clint ran a hand through his hair and flinched as he skimmed the bandage. “I mean, you’ve got a good pitch, but I’m not buying.”

Finally, she sat back far enough that Clint could breath, giving him a considering stare with her piercing green eyes. After a moment, she said, “She must be something else.”

“Who?”

“Whoever you’ve got waiting for you at home.” There was nothing mocking in her tone, just cool observation and a touch of curiosity.

Clint’s head hurt too much to roll his eyes, so he sighed. “Nice. Just because I’m not after your ass, I must have a piece at home.”

He didn’t want to think about Phil, not now, not here, but he couldn’t shut out the memory of strong hands and breath on the back of his neck. He didn’t want to wonder whether the home he’d been promised would still be there when he came back. If he came back.

Romanova just looked at him, and Clint had the feeling she could see a lot more than he meant to show. 

To his surprise, she said quietly, “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

He wasn’t sure he bought the apology, but it seemed wrong to call her out. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just, y’know.... My word’s good, alright? I’m not gonna turn you in or stab you in the back, so you don’t have to do the whole master provocateur schtick. Relax.”

She gave him a sharp look, but the shadow of a smile lingered around her mouth. “What about you? You’re awfully mysterious for a guy who talks so much.”

Clint laughed. “Me? Naw. I’m just a grunt in over his head.”

“Just a grunt. Right,” she said. “Does that ever actually work?”

“What?”

“The whole dumb farm boy schtick.”

Clint grinned. “What schtick?”

Romanova laughed, not a bright and pretty sound that might have been faked, but a low, real rumbling in her throat. “Alright, _Hawkeye_ , tell me this. If you’re just idiot cannon fodder, why not be a good soldier and let your superiors worry about the drive?”

Clint felt the grin go stale on his face. He shifted, leaning his back against the rough wooden wall, fighting down a wave of dizziness. “Because they’ll fuck it up,” he replied. “They’re fucking it up now. I might be an idiot, but I can at least do my damn job.”

“And what job is that?” Romanova asked, and he couldn’t decide if she was teasing him.

“Protecting people,” he said. “I mean, SHIELD’s a pretty sketchy group, when you get down to it, but at least the ultimate intention’s good.” He caught Romanova’s eye and gave her a wry smile. “I know you think this sounds pretty stupid.”  
She shook her head. “I don’t th-”

“Yeah, you do,” Clint said. “I thought it did, too. I mean, who protected me, right? Who was there to save me when I needed it?” The corner of her mouth twitched, and he knew she understood. “And yeah, I coulda stayed on my own, looked out for myself, but I made a choice, and now it’s not about me. It’s about looking out for people who maybe can’t save themselves the way I did. It’s about watching people’s backs and maybe, if you’re lucky, having somebody to watch yours.”

Her expression never changed, not really. She was still smiling, still watching him with a cool gaze, but there was something different, something sad and longing in the lines of her face. Clint only saw it because he knew those themes so very well, and it made his chest ache.

“Do you?” she asked. “Have somebody to watch your back?”

Clint thought of Phil’s sharp suits and the arsenal hidden beneath them, of the worry lines in his brow and his crisp commands over the comm. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” Romanova’s smile dimmed, and he tilted his head to keep her eyes up. “For right now, though, all I’ve got is you, and I’m really hoping you’re not gonna smother me in my sleep.”

She flashed him a wicked grin. “I’ve thought about it.”

“Yeah, well, think about it all you want,” he said, easing carefully back down to the blanket. “Just gimme some warning, okay?”

“Oh, I’ll let you know before I kill you,” she told him. “I think you’ve earned that much.”

“Thanks.” Clint closed his eyes. “Not all that comforting, but thanks.”

He fell asleep not entirely convinced that he was going to wake up, but Romanova let him sleep for at least a few hours, so that was something.

They stole a van. Or rather, Clint stole a van while Romanova kept a lookout and told him to hurry up. Once they were moving, Romanova waved Clint toward the driver’s side. “South. Stay off the main roads. Avoid traffic lights and cities,” she instructed, then proceeded to curl up in the passenger seat and go immediately to sleep.

Clint figured that was fair enough and drove south, keeping to back roads and away from anything that resembled civilization. 

In the quiet lull of country driving, with no company but the steady sound of Romanova’s breathing, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Phil. He’d assaulted another agent, was hurt and probably locked up, and it was Clint’s fault.

_Cutting something in half and sharing it aren’t the same thing._

Except that they were, and Clint knew it. He had never felt more cut in half as he was then, shared between the need to do what was right and his own private need for nothing in the world but Phil. And Phil would be cut in half, too - or cut down - for trying so desperately to share himself between SHIELD and Clint.

Maybe this thing they were doing wasn’t such a good idea, after all, and Clint wondered if he had the balls to carve out that much of his own heart and throw it away. Probably not.

He drove a winding route through rocky fields and dense woods until they hit the coastal road, and Clint turned to drive east along the craggy edge of England. The channel stretched out to the horizon, and it was funny that this small expanse of nothing should have been such an effective barrier against so many enemies.

But, he supposed, greater defenses had fallen at a word and stronger walls had been built from less.

Romanova blinked awake as the car wound its way into the outer edges of Dover, and she stretched her arms and legs with a yawn. She looked around at the passing buildings and gave Clint a brief smile. “You figured out the plan.”

“I’m sorry, plan?” Clint said. “I thought we were making shit up as we go.”

“Only some of it,” she replied. “Head to the marina. We need to find a boat to get us across the channel.”

“Find a boat as in pay someone to take us, or find a boat as in steal one?”

Clint turned onto a port road along the arm of the harbor, and Romanova began studying the lines of boats resting beside short piers. “As in pay someone.” Pointing to a low structure on the left, she said, “Pull in there.”

‘There’ was a parking ramp, and Clint managed to take a ticket without looking directly at the security camera. He parked the stolen van in a corner spot on the top level, and he and Romanova walked away without a glance back. In the elevator, she pulled a baseball cap out of her ever-present black bag and handed it to him. Once it was on, obscuring the blood-spotted bandage on his head, she also handed him the bag.

At his questioning look, she gave a one-sided shrug. “My shoulder’s bothering me.”

Clint frowned. “You should let me look at it.”

“I checked it while you were unconscious,” she said. “It’s going to scar, but I’ll heal.” Smiling, she added, “You did a good job stitching me up, considering I had a gun on you.”

Clint snorted and shook his head. “Yeah, let’s not do that again.”

Romanova smiled and didn’t answer.

They strolled along the marina, the summer sun beating mercilessly down on them, and Romanova looped her arm through Clint’s as if they were just another couple out for a walk. She seemed to be looking for something, and, since Clint didn’t know the first damn thing about boats, he was content to follow her lead.

Well, not content, exactly. The bandage itched, he was exhausted and starving, and the constant throbbing in his head was exacerbated by the heat. It would have been better, he thought, would have been bearable, if only he wasn’t so certain that he’d be arrested and court martialed the moment he got back. If he got back.

Finally, Romanova steered him toward a small, fast-looking boat tethered to a short pier. There was an older man tending it, and she approached him with a sweet smile and some story about her sister in Calais who was in the hospital and how her husband’s - here, she gestured to Clint - visa was restricted and would it be possible to pay for quick and quiet passage across the channel. She had money, she said. Not much, but some, and could he please help them?

Clint wasn’t surprised when the man turned her down gently. 

“Sister in the hospital?” he whispered. “Really?”

Romanova shot him a cold glare from under her eyelashes.

“Excuse me, miss?”

They turned to find another man close by, young and fit and smiling shyly.

“I’m sorry, I just overheard.” He gestured further along the marina, presumably in the direction of his boat. “I’m just about to head across the way. Wouldn’t mind giving you a lift, if you need it.”

Romanova’s face lit up, and even Clint would have believed her, if he didn’t know better. “Really?” she said. “Oh my god. Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to us.”

“It’s no trouble, miss,” he replied, smiling mildly. “She’s up this way. I’ll show you.”

“Thank you!” Romanova repeated, taking Clint’s arm and leading him along.

“Wow,” Clint said, matching her innocent relief. “Can’t imagine this kind of luck.”

“I know! It’s incredible.” She caught his eye, and he knew they were thinking the same thing. When something seemed too good to be true, in Clint’s experience, it usually meant someone was lying.

The man, walking ahead of them, flashed a bright grin over his shoulder. “Right place, right time, I guess.”

As he turned back, his shirt shifted, and Clint saw the barest glimpse of a familiar silhouette as the fabric pulled across the pistol shoved in the back of the man’s jeans.

Without breaking stride, Clint gently extricated Romanova’s arm from his and squeezed her hand. “Run,” he whispered.

She shot him a puzzled glance. “What?”

Ahead of them, the man’s gait slowed.

Clint grabbed her hand and pulled as he spun around. “Run!”

They took off down the boardwalk, and the man swore as he raced after them. Still gripping Romanova’s hand, the two of them sprinted for their lives, darting around irritated pedestrians.

A hand fell on Romanova’s shoulder, and she lashed backward with a swinging fist and a grunt of paint as it jarred her injured shoulder. Clint didn’t look back to see if their pursuer had gone down.

He really should have, though, because, the next moment, a heavy weight crashed into him from behind, and he went down in a tangle of limbs. Clint’s head connected with the pavement, and, for a second, the world disappeared in a white flash of rattled brain cells. He tasted copper and wondered what part of him was bleeding this time.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Romanova deliver a kick to his attacker’s head, and the weight on Clint’s back lifted. He used the respite to roll away, just as Romanova jabbed her elbow into the back of the man’s neck and brought a sharp knee up into his chest. The man went down wheezing and didn’t look like he’d be getting back up soon.

Further back, four men in tracksuits were running in their direction with obvious purpose.

“No time for naps,” Romanova said. She grabbed Clint’s hand to pull him up, and they were off again.

Cint’s head was pounding, a new pulse of pain every time his feet connected with the ground. Dizziness and nausea battled in his stomach and behind his eyes, and he knew they couldn’t keep this up for long.

At least, not together.

“This way!” He pulled her sideways into an alley, winding between buildings until he’d bought them a little bit of time.

“We can’t outrun them,” Romanova panted as they crouched in the narrow space between two dumpsters. Her face was flushed, and she had a hand pressed to her shoulder. “We need a plan.”

“I’ve got one,” Clint said. He rifled through the black bag. Mostly clothing, toiletries, basic first aid, and, at the very bottom, a black, small-caliber handgun. He also pulled out the handcuffs from the side pocket before closing the bag and passed the gun to Romanova. “Here’s the plan,” he told her. “You hide. I’m going to draw them off.”

She slipped the gun into an unseen pocket and shook her head. “You’ll never make it.”

“Yeah, probably not, but you will.” There were shouts from a nearby street, and Clint went on quickly, “If they think I know something, they won’t kill me right off, so there’s time. Find Coulson. Tell him what happened. He’ll help.”

“Who the hell is Coulson?”

“He’s my partner. He’ll be.... I don’t know. Back at the SHIELD office, probably. Or looking for us.” Clint took a breath, forcing down a sudden wave of fear. “Listen, just find him, and tell him....” _Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I love him. Tell him I tried to do good._ “Tell him Francis said this is worse than Colombia.”

Romanova raised an eyebrow. “I assume that’ll mean something to him?”

“Trust me,” Clint said, standing. “Gimme a few minutes to get them away, then get the hell out of here.”

He slung the bag over his shoulder and dashed away, not waiting for an answer, hoping to hell that his instincts were right. One of the men in tracksuits caught sight of him rounding a corner, and, he figured his life was about to get very short and messy if those instincts were wrong. 

Clint burst out of an alley onto a broad avenue, his pursuers close behind him, and poured on speed, running full tilt down the busy sidewalk and praying these assholes weren’t dumb enough to pull out their guns in a crowd.

They weren’t, thankfully, and Clint made it seven blocks at top speed before he felt his body start to give in. He turned sharply onto a side street, and the sudden vertigo sent him reeling into a wall. 

_Not yet,_ he told himself. _Just a little more._

Three more blocks, and he turned another corner just as three of the men appeared behind him. They shouted and raced after him, and Clint doubled back, thinking to get some distance in another direction.

As he emerged back onto the street, he heard another shout and ducked as the fourth man came up swinging at his head.

“You guys are fucking persistent,” he gasped, dancing back out of the man’s reach.

His head was spinning. His feet didn’t seem to be moving right.

“You’ve got something we want,” the man grunted back at him, going for a jab at his gut.

Clint sidestepped and slipped one ring of the handcuffs around the man’s wrist as his fist went by. Following his own momentum, Clint jerked the captive arm backward and clipped the other ring to one of the man’s belt loops. The man spun in a circle, trying to figure out what, exactly, Clint had done.

“Looks like you’re stuck, pal,” Clint said, and turned away to slip into another alley.

He didn’t see what it was that hit him in the head, but he guessed it was probably a baseball bat.

Whatever it was, it hurt. A lot. And he came to with blinding pain driving through his skull.

He blinked against the lights that probably seemed a lot brighter than they actually were and tried, unsuccessfully, to swallow back the bile burning his throat. There wasn’t much in his stomach to vomit, but two successive concussions made sure that every last bit of it came back up. Most of it wound up on his shirt.

“Charming,” said a bland English voice, barely audible over the ringing in Clint’s ears.

Slowly, Clint looked up, trying desperately to make his eyes focus.

“You’ve caused quite a bit of trouble,” the voice went on. “Turning up where you shouldn’t be, and whatnot.”

Clint shut his eyes and took deep breaths, evening out his thin, unsteady pulse. When he looked back, the world was clearer, and he could make out the bland, impassive face of the man in the factory, his features now spotted with small bandages and healing burns.

“I don’t know who you are, and, frankly, I don’t care,” the unremarkable man said with the same cool tone in which he had so recently ordered Clint’s death. “But you’ve caught my employer’s interest, and he’s _very_ keen to speak with you.”

Clint swallowed, forcing some moisture into his suddenly dry mouth. He worked his parched lips, looking for the right expression, and finally inclined his head forward and spat a thin gob of saliva, bile, and blood onto the floor.

“Bring it,” he growled, and the man smiled.

***

It was easy to write off junior agents as inexperienced, incompetent, and likely to screw up missions with a simple mistake or oversight. What those assumptions overlooked, Phil thought, was that agents were vetted and tested by a thousand trials before they ever set foot in a SHIELD facility. Most of them, Clint had once observed, were badasses before they ever had a clearance level.

A thorough search of the jacket’s pockets turned up a pocket knife, a burner phone, a handful of cash in pounds and euros, and a folded sheet of printed paper with a brief of Montoya’s findings on Healey. It wasn’t enough to buy forgiveness, but it brought Montoya up a notch in Phil’s estimation.

He kept Clint’s bow and quiver in the box, for the time being. Doubt still lingered as to what he would find at the end of this road, and the sight of those things.... Phil swallowed.

Shut it down. Shut it away.

He hitched a ride on a truck headed for the coast and rode through the early night, dozing as the driver hummed along with the radio. He didn’t think about the way Clint hummed whenever he ran the microwave because he didn’t like the sound it made.

The driver left him at a small chain hotel on the east end of the city, and Phil thanked him with a nod and a few folded notes. Inside, the desk clerk ignored him except to give him a key in exchange for money and yawned as Phil left him in peace.

Clint and Romanova wouldn’t risk crossing through the Channel or taking a ferry, Phil thought. They’d be looking for a boat, commercial or private, and that meant they couldn’t make a move until first light, at least, assuming they hadn’t crossed already. Either way, there were a few hours yet before Phil could do much of anything, and he guessed that SHIELD would be half a day or more behind him. So he chose to take advantage of the respite.

He slept in his clothes, his boots by the bed and Montoya’s jacket close at hand, and laid the box with Clint’s gear on the bed beside him. 

Phil dreamed of drowning and didn’t sleep well. He woke with a start, his skin prickling with cold from the hotel air conditioner, and reached automatically under the pillow for a gun that wasn’t there.

“Fuck,” he mumbled, dropping his face into the pillow. “Jesus. Goddamn cocksucking son of a _bitch_.” He rolled onto his back and rubbed at his eyes. They were hot and stinging and wet at the corners. “Goddammit, _Clint_. Please,” he said, to himself and to the air. “Please let him be okay. Whatever else happens, just.... God. Just let me see him again.”

There was no one listening, and there was no answer. Phil splashed his face with cold water in the bathroom sink and fought to keep control of the vicious, blank whiteness that was shredding his insides.

The long plastic evidence box was still in its place on the bed, resting beside the indentation where his body had been. He let it lie, for the moment, and instead read through the brief on Healey, frowning as he went.

“What...?” 

The facts told a story that made no sense. Someone was funnelling money into Healey’s hackneyed organization, but, as far as analysis showed, most of it just went into Healey’s pocket or into the veins of his thugs and the coffers of local bars and strip clubs. The rest was tied to under-the-table deals with every kind of crazy, from IRA cell leaders to Italian politicians. What the deals were and where things went from there was anyone’s guess.

So what did it have to do with SHIELD? Phil wondered. And where was the money coming from? With a sigh, he refolded the paper and returned it to his pocket.

He looked again at the plain black box, and his heart felt weak, unequal to the challenge of keeping him in forward motion. He had insisted that Clint teach him to use the bow and had eventually managed to hit the target with acceptable consistency. The sight of it now, with its calculated curves and its grip worn by the pressure of Clint’s hand, brought him back to the cold, over-filtered air of the firing range, the distant circles of the target, and the warm whisper of Clint’s breath in his ear.

Phil shivered and shut the memory down, shut it away as he lifted the gear out of the box and pulled off the plastic bags. He’d watched Clint change enough worn and broken strings to know where the spare was and how to anchor the new string at one end and draw in the bow’s arms to attach it at the other.

It was difficult, and he didn’t think about the astonishing flex of Clint’s muscles as he performed this same task with practiced ease.

Concealing the quiver under his jacket was simple enough, and, after a moment’s thought, Phil just slung the bow over one shoulder. From a distance, it would look enough like a strange fishing rod to avoid notice, and, up close.... Well, no one would be expecting to see a man strolling along with a medieval projectile weapon, and people were adept at ignoring things they didn’t expect to see.

Even in the early morning, the heat had already begun to gather, and the sun promised a relentless day to come. Phil wound his way through the thin crowds of tourists and shipping crews, scanning every face with wan, tired hope. He paused, here and there, to ask if anyone had seen a man - blue eyes, broad shoulders, possibly with a head wound - or a woman - red hair, very beautiful - looking for a boat to Calais.

His inquiries were met with shrugs and shaking heads and one sailor who asked, leering, “Aw. She run out on you?”

“No,” Phil replied flatly. “He did.” There was a satisfying click as the man’s jaw snapped shut.

He worked his way west around the harbor, and his patience ran thinner as the sun climbed higher. The sunburnt attendant at a magazine stand said that he’d seen a beautiful redhead, but she’d been alone. A security guard rolled her eyes and said that half the men around there had broad shoulders and head wounds, or at least they acted like it. An ice cream vendor near the marina narrowed his eyes at Phil and asked if he meant the tourists who’d been fighting.

Phil blinked. “Fighting?”

“There was a ginger and two fellas. Made a real fuckin’ mess of things,” he grumbled. “Some others grabbed the poor bloke they knocked out and ran off after ‘em.”

“Where?” Phil’s heart was in his throat, and he had to keep a hard grip on his voice. “Where did they go?”

The man shrugged, gesturing vaguely along the harborwalk. “I don’t know. Somewhere that way.”

Phil was already jogging in that direction, calling “Thank you” over his shoulder.

A sidewalk chase was an ephemeral thing, cutting through crowds that immediately closed, but there were signs enough to follow: a scattering of trash from an overturned bin, a witness speaking loudly to a puzzled police officer. Phil scanned for tell-tale details and kept asking.

A blue-eyed man and a red-headed woman. They might have been running. They might have been in trouble. Had anyone seen them? Where did they go?

Suddenly, there she was. At the corner of Phil’s eye, there was a flash of red, and he turned in time to see a woman vanish into a narrow alleyway. 

He didn’t startle, didn’t run, didn’t give in to the impulse to go speeding after her and break her fingers until she told him where Clint had gone. Instead, he ambled toward the alley, keeping his pace even and his eyes cast elsewhere. He looked for signs that she wasn’t alone, for anyone else watching where she had gone or watching Phil himself. There was no one.

The narrow passage was empty, nothing in sight but garbage bins and potholes. Phil pulled the bow from his shoulder and carefully drew an arrow from the quiver under his jacket. The tip of it looked ordinary enough, and, as he nocked it, Phil hoped he hadn’t pulled the one filled with glue or tear gas or whatever RnD had been equipping Clint with.

Carefully, he eased around the corner, peering into the adjoining alley, tense for any movement or sound. His boots were silent on the dusty concrete, and the unfamiliar weapon was steady in his grip.

Nothing. Romanova had disappeared. Again.

Still on guard, Phil moved into the wider path. His heart was loud in his ears, pounding out a rhythm of desperation.

It wasn’t a noise that alerted him, or a flicker of motion or anything else; it was just the sharpened instincts of decades spent on guard for his life telling him that, all of a sudden, there was someone behind him.

Phil drew the bow as he spun around, and his sight along the arrow fell into a perfect line with the barrel of Romanova’s gun.

“Put it down,” he commanded, his voice tight and cold. “I’m not interested in you. I just want the man you were with.”

To his surprise, she asked sharply, “Are you Coulson?”

Phil blinked. Clint wouldn’t have given her any more information than necessary, so why, of all the things, would he have told her that? Phil drew the bowstring tighter. “Where is he?”

“He told me to find you,” Romanova said, and, slowly, she tilted the gun away and shifted her finger off the trigger. “He said you could help.”

“Where is he?” he repeated, low and dangerous, and kept his aim steady.

Romanova sighed, like this whole confrontation was a waste of time. “He said....” She paused, giving Phil an evaluating look, then went on, “Francis says this is worse than Colombia.”

Phil’s heart stopped. There was no stuttering halt or missed beat; it simply stopped moving in his chest. He felt his blood pressure drop, and the whiteness in his head threatened to overwhelm him again. Slowly, forcing his frozen muscles to move, he eased his hold on the string and lowered the bow.

“Where is he?”

“They have him,” Romanova replied, and it was all Phil could do to stay standing.

“Who has him?” he demanded. “Healey’s people?”

“Healey?” Romanova repeated, raising an eyebrow. “You know, for the world’s foremost intelligence agency, SHIELD could really stand to step up its game.”

Phil scowled. “Miz Romanova, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not really in the mood to chat. Now, you’re going to tell me who has my agent and how I can get him back, or this conversation is going to end _very_ abruptly.”

She studied him, for a moment, and Phil didn’t know if she was deciding whether to trust him or to wait and shoot him in the back. Probably both. After a moment, she said, “Healey’s a middle man. He’s the go-between for some arms dealer expanding his empire. Whoever he’s working for, that’s who has Hawkeye.”

_Hawkeye._ So Clint had given her three names, and they all meant nothing to her. “I don’t suppose you have any information on this mystery employer.”

“Just that he’s a mystery,” she said. “And that he’s a nasty piece of work, at least according to Healey.”

“Yes, well, I can be pretty nasty, myself,” Phil told her coldly. “And if anything happens to my agent, then you, Healey, and everyone else connected to this mess is going to find out exactly how nasty.”

Romanova didn’t blanch or falter, but her expression made it clear that she believed him completely. “They’ll have taken him out on the water, away from the shipping lanes,” she said. “It’s quiet, private, and it’ll give them time to work on him before they get to Calais.”

She didn’t say, _And because it’s easier to dispose of a body in open water_ , and Phil resolutely didn’t think it.

“Is the drive in Calais?”

There was no change in her face, but her pause and sudden stillness gave Phil his answer. “No.”

“Where is it?” he asked, with a sudden, sinking feeling that he knew the answer to that, too.

“It’s with him,” she said. “It’s with Hawkeye.”


	4. Chapter 4

In the end, the only way they could get the needle in was to knock Clint hard enough in the head that he blacked out. Dazed, he watched the blood well up from the injection site on his arm, surrounded by the cuts and scratches where they’d try to stick him before.

They might win, in the end, but he was gonna make these assholes fight for every inch.

“Drugs,” he drawled. “That’s original.”

Somebody backhanded him. He felt the impact, but the stinging pain was a blurred sensation, as if he knew what it was supposed to feel like and his brain was just filling it in. Whatever they’d given him was working fast.

“Oh shit. You gave me the good stuff.” Clint grinned. He could taste the blood on his mouth, and he hoped his smile looked like the stuff of nightmares. “You guys are great. Seriously.”

“Yeah, we’re terrific,” said the guy in charge, an American with hard eyes and an expensive haircut. “Now why don’t we have a chat. Since we’re friends.”

No one had touched Clint but the two thugs, who now stepped back as their boss pulled up a chair to sit in front of him. The bland, boring man stood off to the side, looking like he was one good nipple twist from coming in his pants. Mister boss man just looked irritated by the whole thing.

They’d zip-tied Clint to a wooden office chair with wheels, and it kept sliding around every time the deck shifted. He’d come to the conclusion that they had him on a boat, which sort of made him feel the opposite of better, and the constant motion was making him sick. 

“I dunno,” Clint said. It was getting harder to form words. “Think I oughta know your name, if we’re friends.”

The boss man smiled, the look of a predator on the edge of mania. “Fair enough. I’m William. Now how about you tell me your name?”

“I’m Dick. Dick Cox.” Clint giggled. The boss man - William - sighed and punched him in the stomach. 

“Let’s try this again,” he said, as Clint fought to breathe. “What’s your name?”

“John,” Clint choked out. “Jacob Jengahammer Smith. Schmitt. Whatever.”

This time, William punched him in the mouth, and Clint felt his lip split against his teeth. The pain was distant, though, and the blood dribbled down over his chin.

“I guess your name’s not all that important,” William admitted. “I mean, the Black Widow just left you there, and SHIELD obviously doesn’t give a shit about you.” He leaned forward and squinted into Clint’s battered face. “It is SHIELD, isn’t it? You were with Romanova, but SHIELD’s got your leash.”

“Shield,” Clint repeated, the sibilants slurring on his tongue. “Don’t got a shield. Captain America’s got a shield, but I’m not Captain America.”

The boring man laughed, but William frowned. “You got that right.” To mister boring, he said, “This guy’s not all there.”

Mister boring coughed. “He was similarly uncooperative before, and he seems to have sustained a head injury in the meantime.”

“S’right, motherfuckers. Got myself a concussion.” Clint dropped his head and laughed to himself. _Concussion_ was a funny word.

William rolled his eyes. “This fucking figures. You get your hands on a SHIELD agent, and he’s got brain damage and the IQ of a grapefruit. Does this asshole even know anything?”

“Hey!” Clint protested. “Mot an asshole.” Tonguing at the cut in his lip, he added, “Okay, I’m kind of an asshole, but m’not a grapefruit. Grapefruit’s suck, an’ I don’t suck. Okay, I suck sometimes, but only sometimes.” He looked at William, trying to focus his eyes. “Not you, though. Not gonna suck you.”

“Oh for....” William grabbed Clint by the hair and pulled hard.

Like everything else, the pain of it was separate, kept away from Clint by a clear barrier of drugs and, potentially, brain damage, but the force of it shocked a wail out of him. “Ow! Ow. Don’t like that.”

“Listen to me, you little shit,” William spat into his face. “I don’t have time for this, so you’re gonna tell me where the goddamn drive is right the fuck now.”

There were important words in there, Clint knew, but the only words that came to his mouth were, “Forty-seven.” He paused, thinking about numbers. “Forty-seven. Didn’t drive, though. Widow drive. Drove. Drive good.”

“Forty-seven?” William repeated. “Forty-seven what?”

“Forty-seven,” Clint said again weakly, shaking his head. “Forty-seven and one. Two.” He laughed. “Tryin’ to help. Help people. Doin’ my job an’ got shot for it.” He rolled his eyes up toward William. “D’you know they shot me? Right here. In the head.”

“Might just shoot you in the head, myself,” William grumbled. “Jesus, Healey, how much of that shit did you give him? He’s high as a kite.”

“I may have misjudged the dosage,” mister boring - Healey - said, shrugging. “He’ll come down, eventually.”

“‘M not high,” Clint whined, kicking his bound feet against the ground to set the chair moving. “‘M low, motherfuckers. Low, low, low.” Cackling, he threw his head back and sang loudly, “ _Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin’ on to carry me home._ ”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” William kicked him in the shin and the chair spun to the right. 

Clint went right on howling at the top of his lungs, “ _Take me home, country road. To the place I belong...._ ”

“Jesus christ. Would you shut him up before I break his jaw?” William said, and thug number two obediently slugged Clint in his already beaten mouth.

Clint was pretty sure he swallowed part of a tooth, on that one. He sucked in a wet breath and blew bubbles through the mess of blood and spit on his lips, still laughing. “Sticks an’ stones, asshole,” he wheezed.

The thug punched him in the stomach, this time, and got close enough for Clint to bite down on the fabric of his track jacket. The man lurched back in surprise, pulling Clint and the chair off balance. Clint let go, and the momentum sent him and the wooden chair crashing sideways onto the rolling deck.

A distant stab of pain shot through Clint’s shoulder, pulsing through his blurred senses, and he just kept choking on laughter, loud and wild. They were going to kill him. Sooner or later, they’d have enough of his bullshit and realize he wasn’t going to give them what they wanted, and then they would kill him.

The job was done, it was over. He’d saved forty-seven agents at the cost of his own miserable life, just when it was starting to get a little less miserable, and it was just too goddamn funny.

“This is a waste of time,” William said. “We’re not gonna get anything out of him until he starts to come down.”

Clint didn’t think they were trying all that hard, honestly, but he was laughing too much to say so.

“I think we can work some of the drug out of his system,” Healey said. “It might take a moment.”

“Do it,” William snapped, turning away. “We’re running out of time.”

Once he was gone, Healey told the two thugs, “Set a pot of water boiling, and bring me a bucket of ice water. We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

Clint thought the old-fashioned way was probably going to suck, but he just knocked his head against the toppled chair and laughed harder. Hot, hysterical tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and streaked across his face. He couldn’t breathe, his chest tight and aching, and the laughter slowly turned to hard, heaving gasps. It felt like he was bursting with it, like this feeling was going to rip him apart at the seams.

He was going to pop, like a great big Barton balloon, he thought, and that image set him wheezing again.

The awful laughter might never have stopped but for the sudden splash of icy water on his face, shocking air into his lungs. Clint sputtered and hiccoughed, distantly thankful for the soothing cold. If nothing else, it made it easier to continue working his hand, easing the zip-tie toward the end of the chair arm.

“Aw, c’mon, guys. I don’t smell that bad,” Clint moaned, and thug number one scraped the toe of one big, dirty boot across his mouth.

“Shut up.”

“You shut up.” Clint giggled. “Gotta talk if I’m s’pose to tell you stuff.”

A pair of much cleaner shoes came into Clint’s line of sight, and Healey crouched down in front of him. “Do you have something to tell us?” he asked mildly.

“Lots to tell you,” Clint said, grinning through his busted lips. “D’you know Gibson wrote _Neuromancer_ on a typewriter? And there’re gay dolphins?” He laughed. “Dolphins, man. Fuckers got it right.”

Healey made a face somewhere between amusement and revulsion. “I really should have killed you sooner.”

“Yeah,” Clint said, spitting blood and saliva onto Healey’s shoes. “You really shoulda.”

Healy just shrugged and stood. To the thugs, he said, “Now the hot.”

The water wasn’t actually boiling, but the difference in degrees made little difference to Clint. The blistering heat burned through the drug haze, searing his skin and scorching into every part of him. He screamed, and the water ran into his throat, into his lungs and stomach, burning him from the inside out.

In the far away part of his brain that wasn’t touched by these things, Clint thought that at least he’d be prepared when he got to Hell, and he kept working the zip-tie forward.

Slowly, the water started to cool, leaving his whole body feeling flayed and tender. His clothes were chafing where they were plastered to his skin, and he fought to breathe through a raw throat. And Clint knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were going to do that again.

Healey shoved a toe under Clint’s cheek and angled his head up. “Now would you like to tell me where the drive is?”

Clint wanted to come back with a witty remark. He wanted to tell these assholes to fuck off or kill him or something, but he honestly couldn’t help the weak, wracking laugh that came tumbling up out of his chest.

“Swimming,” he gasped, and it really was just the funniest thing. “Like a fish.”

Healey let Clint’s head drop with a sigh of disgust. “Useless,” he spat. “Keep at it,” he told the thugs. “Perhaps we can wring something out of him before we throw him overboard.”

“Man overboard,” Clint mumbled, still laughing.

The next splash of icy water hit his steaming skin like a sledgehammer, and Clint wondered, suddenly, if drowning really did feel like falling asleep.

He hoped it did.

***

The cold spray stung Phil’s eyes as the little boat sped through the rough waters of the Channel. Romanova sat beside him as he steered, sometimes indicating that he should veer this way or that, her hand never very far from the gun in her pocket.

Phil wondered at the bizarre confluence of events that had put a SHIELD agent and an infamous assassin in common cause. There was no confluence, though, he supposed. Not really. There were no events. There was just Clint Barton, in the middle of this giant mess, daring everyone else to keep up.

Phil swallowed hard and kept his eyes ahead.

They’d been circling for two hours, moving away from the main traffic across the channel, into the scattering of leisure vessels floating idly on the water. Even here, though, there were dozens of boats in sight, a dizzying variety of sizes and types, and Clint could be on any one of them.

_If I were a dangerous arms dealer,_ Phil thought. _Where would I be?_

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said suddenly, and Romanova looked up at him. “Healey’s boss hired you to steal the drive?” She nodded. “So what does a gun pusher want with SHIELD operations intel? There’s no mission details, nothing about weapons caches or shipments. There might be an op that threatens his business, if he’s working in the region.”

“This is an awful lot of trouble for information about one op,” Romanova observed, and Phil had to agree.

“There’s something else going on.” He shook his head. “Securing the drive is priority one. Agent... Hawkeye is priority two. We can sort out the rest later.”

Romanova gave him a bemused look. “You almost sound convincing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re not here for the drive,” she said. “You’re here for him.”

Phil set his jaw and didn’t bother arguing.

After a moment, Romanova asked, “What will you do if we don’t find him?”

The persistent white pain pulsed in his gut, and Phil shook his head. Shut it down. Shut it away. “If we don’t secure the drive and that intel gets out, every SHIELD operation in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa will be compromised. The loss of contacts and intelligence could set us back a decade, and the loss of life....” _Forty-seven agents._ “The loss of life would be devastating.”

“High stakes,” she remarked, her tone even and unreadable. “But that’s not what I asked.”

Phil gave her a cold look and didn’t answer.

“You can’t go back.”

The sun was still high and bright, glinting off the water in sharp fragments, throwing slim shadows around the trailing boats. Phil focused on the light, on the water, on the task at hand, and not on the desperate fear threatening to claw its way out through his skin. 

“No,” he said. “If the mission fails, I’m burned. Without the drive, I can’t go back.” Without Clint, he didn’t want to.

He didn’t know how much Romanova could read between his lines, but he suspected that there was more written there than he would like.

“Your superiors think he’s betrayed them,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

She looked at him steadily. “Did it ever occur to you that he may have?”

“No.” Phil glanced over and caught the flicker of skepticism on her face. “He’s capable of a lot of things. Betrayal isn’t one of them.”

“You know that?”

“I know that.”

“Huh.” She paused, and Phil thought it was remarkable that he’d managed to puzzle the Black Widow with so simple a concept as loyalty. Of course, if he judged things right, it seemed like Clint had done a fair job of puzzling her already. “What was he doing in the factory?” she asked. “If you were after the drive, then crashing the meet doesn’t make any sense.”

_Forty-seven agents, sir. I can’t just let that go._ “We were blown,” Phil told her. “He was trying to get a tracer on you before we aborted.”

“Huh,” Romanova said again, and Phil raised an eyebrow. “He had plenty of opportunity. Not there, but after we left. He could have planted the tracer and run any time. So why didn’t he?”

“Keeping eyes on the target is more reliable than trusting technology,” Phil said, but something tugged at his brain. Clint would have had the tracer in his hand, ready to palm it off. “Are you sure he didn’t plant it?”

Romanova gave him an amused look. “I’m sure.”

“So what happened to it?” Phil wondered. “He wouldn’t have dropped or lost it, and he would have used every resource he had to hand. So....” It was almost embarrassing, Phil thought, how long it had taken that little piece to click into place. “Goddammit. Here, you drive.”

He stood aside so that Romanova could take his place at the helm. “Why? What...?” Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

Phil fumbled in his jacket pockets for the burner phone Montoya had left him. It was a far cry from his usual cell, but all he needed was the GPS. He found the application’s back door and punched in the sequence for a standard SHIELD short-range trace. Holding his breath, Phil called up the map, and... there it was: a single ping not fifty meters to the south.

“He planted it on himself.”

Looking over his shoulder, Romanova smiled. “He really is smarter than he pretends to be.”

“You have no idea.”

Romanova turned the small boat to the south and set off at high speed, weaving deftly around the other vessels. Phil held tight to the handrail and stared between the phone screen and the water around him.

Clint was close, somewhere nearby, near enough that he might even have heard if Phil called out.

The ping came closer as the boats around them thinned, and Phil looked between them, scanning for any detail that might give away the target. In range were a small yacht, a light fishing boat, and a houseboat that appeared to have seen better days. Phil zeroed in on the houseboat as they came up on the tracer’s location, watching it with hard suspicion.

Romanova overshot the target, and Phil looked up, confused. She circled back, crossing almost on top of the signal, and still there was no indication which boat it might be.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Phil frowned at the screen. “He should be right here.”

“It’s in the water,” Romanova said. “The signal’s in the water.”

Phil shook his head to keep the whiteness from overwhelming him. Shut it down. Shut it away. “No. No, that’s not possible. He’s got t-”

“There!” Romanova pointed to a dark shape bobbing in the waves, and Phil’s heart froze.

No. No, it couldn’t be. There was a mistake. It couldn’t be Clint.

Romanova guided the boat alongside the floating object and reached down to pull up a plain black bag, dripping wet and apparently empty.

Phil blinked. “What the hell?”

“It’s mine,” she said. “Hawkeye took it.” She opened a side pocket and held up the small metal shape of a standard SHIELD tracking device.

All the hope Phil had been clinging to evaporated. “Shit,” he muttered. 

“Back to square one, I guess,” Romanova said, handing Phil the empty bag.

He took it from her and threw it violently to the deck. “Yes, we’re back to square fucking one,” he spat. “Jesus, maybe they’re not even on the water. Or maybe they’ve made it to Calais. Maybe they found the drive and they just....” _killed him already._

Romanova scowled. “So that’s it? All that, and you’re just giving up?”

“Of course I’m not giving up,” Phil snapped. He would give up when he was dead, because without Clint and without the drive, that was all he would be. “But I have officially run out of ideas.”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “at least you have the drive, now.”

Phil stopped and stared at her. “Whatt?”

“It’s in the bag,” she told him, nodding toward it. “Side pocket, sewn into the lining.”

He looked from Romanova to the soaked black bag in disbelief. “No.”

She sighed and grabbed the bag. Producing a knife from, presumably, somewhere in her clothes, she ripped open a seam inside the same pocket where the tracer had been hidden. Sure enough, there between the black folds, was a solid-state drive the size of a box of mints.

To Phil’s surprise, she held it out to him silently, and he took it from her with a cold, sinking feeling. “He knew where it was,” he said. “He knew where it was, and he left the tracer in the bag so SHIELD would find it.”

Romanova shook her head, a small smile on her red lips. “He’s something else, your Hawkeye.”

“Barton,” he corrected, because it didn’t matter anymore and because someone needed to know. “His name is Clint Barton, and he gave up his best hope of rescue to protect the agents whose names are on this tiny piece of technological crap.”

Phil gripped the drive tight in his hand, its edges digging hard into his skin. He could have crushed it, could have ground it under his heel for all the hardship it had caused.

“So that’s it, then,” Romanova said. “Objective accomplished. You can go home. I can escape SHIELD custody. Everybody wins.” She shrugged. “Everybody except Barton.”

Phil shot her a cold look. “No. That’s not how this works.”

He put the drive and the tracer back into the large pocket of the bag, casting around for something heavy. He spotted the boat’s shiny steel anchor, just small enough to fit in the bag, and zipped it inside. On the burner phone, he sent a text with the tracer’s signal code to Braddock’s personal cell, then stuck the phone in the bag, as well. With a prayer to the patron saint of espionage, he tossed the whole thing over the side with a splash and watched the bag sink into the dark water of the Channel.

Turning back, he found Romanova watching him with an unreadable expression. “SHIELD can send divers to retrieve the drive. It’ll be safe down there for now.”

“That was a valuable bargaining chip,” she said flatly. “You could have bought your life back. Or _his_ life.”

“I don’t....” Phil shook his head. He couldn’t tell her that his life wasn’t worth buying if it meant leaving Clint behind, or that, faced with the choice, he would trade that drive and everything he knew in exchange for Clint’s life and have the weight of forty-seven other lives on his head. “It’s too valuable. Now, the queen’s off the board, and the game changes.”

Romanova sighed. “I can’t believe I’m going along with you, or your cliché chess metaphor, but you can’t guard your king if you don’t know where he is.”

Phil thought maybe that metaphor gave away more than he’d meant to, but Romanova didn’t seem concerned with his motivations. “Why _are_ you going along with this?”

She shrugged. “Curiousity. I want to see how it plays out.”

That was professional grade bullshit if Phil had ever heard it, but he let it pass. “You’re right, though,” he admitted. “We have to find him, first, and I have... no ideas.”

Miles of sea, hundreds of boats, and the endless expanse of Europe beyond. Clint could be twenty feet or twenty leagues away, and it would come to the same end.

Suddenly, there was a shout and a scream, muted by the crashing waves and the rumble of engines, and, on the outer deck of the nearby yacht, a figure stood with the unmistakable stance of a man aiming a gun.

Phil’s blood ran cold.

“Here’s an idea,” Romanova said. “How about we look there?”

***

They did the hot-and-cold trick about a dozen more times, taking the opportunity in between dousing Clint to knock him around and keep asking him the same damn question. At one point, they decided to switch things up by turning him and the chair face-up on the floor so that they could pour the water straight into his eyes and mouth.

The zip tie was cutting into Clint’s wrist, and he used the blood to slick up the arm of the chair. Without a close inspection, it would just look like he cut himself pulling at the restraints. With a little bit of luck and a little more time, he’d have one free hand, and Clint could wreak a lot of havoc with one free hand.

To be fair, luck and time weren’t things he tended to have a lot of.

“That’s enough,” William announced, slamming the door behind him. “If he’s not lucid now, then he’s retarded.”

“Wouldn’t write that off as a possibility,” Healey muttered.

Clint tried to give him a grin, but his face felt numb and swollen. His head spun as the two thugs hauled him upright, and he coughed up a mouthful of bile. His wrist was aching and raw. Just a few more minutes. Just a few more centimeters.

“Alright. Last chance, you worthless piece of crap,” William said. “Where’s the drive?”

Clint spat to clear out his mouth. “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “What do you want with SHIELD op specs?”

Traces of the drugs still lingered in his system and left him feeling slow and dull, but the soft buffer of delirium was gone. His head ached, and he longed to crawl into bed and fall asleep listening to Phil snore. 

_Phil_.

William just smiled. “I like to know where the party is.”

“Party’s right here,” Clint said. “In my pants.”

“Clever.”

“Yup.” Clint kept working at the zip tie, moving it forward by maddening fractions. “Seriously though. That intel’s only good if you’re a SHIELD agent or a terrorist, and you don’t really strike me as the terror-inducing type.”

“And you don’t strike me as the type to ask questions,” William snapped back. “So stop fishing and tell me what I want to know.”

So close. It was so close. “What for? You’re gonna kill me, whatever I say, so why the fuck should I tell you anything?” He looked from William to Healey to the two thugs. “You guys’ve got to work on your technique, here.”

“How about this.” William crouched down in front of Clint, looking up at him. “You tell me where the drive is, and I’ll knock you out before we throw you over. Quick, clean, you won’t even feel it.”

“Yeah, y’know. I didn’t wake up this morning with a real strong need to die, so that’s just not real appealing,” Clint said. “I appreciate the offer though.”

“Well, if you don’t tell me,” William replied, “I’ll make you wish you didn’t wake up this morning at all. How does that sound?”

“Man, I already wish I didn’t wake up this morning.” He was close enough to curl his hand around and catch the zip tie with his the tips of his fingers. “It’s been a hell of a day.”

“It can get worse,” William told him coldly. “It can get so much worse.”

Clint coughed up a laugh, his throat scratched and aching. “Worse than selling out my people for a quick death? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Maybe it would be quick, anyway, if he fought hard enough. Maybe he could take them down with him and leave a few bodies for the cops to find. Then, at least, SHIELD might have some idea what happened to him. Then Phil might know that....

Phil wouldn’t know anything. He’d know Clint died fighting, and that was something, but he wouldn’t know for what. He wouldn’t know how badly Clint wanted to rewind the past year and do it all over again, but this time do it right. He wouldn’t know that the only strong and certain place in Clint’s heart was the place where he lived. 

Well, fuck that, Clint thought. This wasn’t a suicide run. This was a goddamn escape.

“You’re all going to die,” William said. “You, the Widow, your friends at SHIELD. But you can make it quick and easy for all of them. All you have to do is tell me where the drive is.”

Clint looked away. He closed his eyes, feeling the zip tie slip just little closer to the edge. “Fine. Christ. Look, you wanna know the truth?”

“Considering a lie would result in breaking your knuckles? Yes, the truth would be preferable.”

He sighed and looked William dead in the eye. “She never told me where it was.”

William scowled, and the zip tie slipped over the edge, loosening the pressure on Clint’s raw, bleeding wrist. Clint grabbed him by the hair and smashed his face hard into the chair. Everything seemed slower than it should have been, more distant than it was supposed to be, but Clint let his body take over, battered as it was.

He stood on bound feet, swinging the chair around with the hand that was still tied. The chair collided with the nearest thug, sending him reeling, and Clint felt a sickening snap as the chair careened off at an angle. His hand came free, but it throbbed with sharp pain. He couldn’t feel his fingers, and he didn’t dare look at it.

Clint jumped over William and jabbed an elbow hard into the chest of thug number two, followed by an uppercut to the nose. He was whirling to face Healey and thug number one when sharp agony stabbed through the back of his knee. His leg gave out, and Clint went down hard on his knees, catching himself on a bruised and aching elbow.

“I’ve had enough of you, you little cocksucker,” William growled, yanking the knife out of Clint’s leg.

Clint gritted his teeth to hold back a howl. “Feeling’s mutual asshole,” he said, and kicked William in the face.

He tried to scramble forward across the floor, but Healey stepped up, toeing at Clint’s swollen wrist. “Oh dear,” he said. “I do believe that’s broken.”

It was predictable, really. Even through the fog of pain and the lingering drugs, Clint saw it coming, but prescience didn’t matter when Healey brought his foot down hard on the wrist, grinding in his heel. Clint screamed and blacked out, overloaded, and he drifted for a moment in a dark sea where every horror he had ever imagined was reaching up to grab him.

He came back to himself when minion number one yanked his hands behind his back, binding them together with something rough and heavy. This time, Clint managed to bite down on the agonized keening in his throat and turn it into a stuttering hiss.

“...not worth the risk,” Healey was saying. “Breaking him will take time that we can’t spare.”

“So break him faster,” William spat, his voice thick and wet through his broken nose. “If I don’t get that fucking drive, I want to wring every last bit of intel out of this fucker.”

“And if he doesn’t have anything worth knowing?”

“Then you get to play with him until you get bored. Win-win.”

There was no answer, but Clint suspected that Healey was giving serious consideration that prospect. He found himself thinking of ways to make them kill him quickly.

“I don’t know anything,” he wheezed, his chest and throat aching. “I’m just a gun. They point; I shoot. I don’t know anything.”

Someone kicked him in the side, and all the air went out of Clint’s lungs in a rush. He coughed, leaving a faint spatter of blood on the floor.

Healey heaved a loud sigh. “With respect, Mister Cross, I do believe this one’s more trouble than he’s worth. As much as I would enjoy breaking him of that habit, we have other concerns.”

“Fine,” William grumbled, and Clint could hear the loathing, could hear how much this man wanted to see him torn apart. “Throw him over. If we hurry, we can still make our afternoon flight.”

“Going on vacation?” Clint piped up hoarsely, and he got another kick. 

“Jesus christ. Are all SHIELD agents this mouthy?”

“Just the dumb ones,” Clint gasped.

This time, no one kicked him, but someone took hold of the bindings on his ankles and started dragging him, face down, across the hard, slick floor. He struggled, fighting to flip onto his back, but a foot connected with his head, leaving him dazed as he was hauled up the short stairs, his face banging hard into the edge of every step.

There was so much pain in every inch of him, that it had all become a faraway thing. The bullet graze on his head had started bleeding again, and the blood, water, and sweat ran into his eyes and into his mouth, and all he could think was, _I’m sorry._

What one or many of the myriad sins he’d committed he was sorry _for_ , Clint couldn’t have said. For Phil, he supposed. Everything to do with Phil. Everything he’d done wrong. Everything he wouldn’t get a chance to do right.

They dragged him onto the open deck, and the sudden rush of cold air and bright sun hit Clint like a revelation. The world went on, open and alive, and he was going to die alone in the unfeeling water border between foreign countries.

He’d be damned if he didn’t go down fighting.

Ignoring the sharp pain in his injured leg, Clint turned quickly onto his side and pulled in his legs, kicking hard into the back of thug number two’s knee. The man staggered, off balance, and let go of Clint with a shout. Clint spun himself into a sitting position and got his feet under him.

He stood, dizzy and unsteady, and managed, for an instant, to look William squarely in the eye, before thug number one, brow split from where Clint had hit him with the chair, pistol whipped him.

Clint fell back, landing on his bound hands, and screamed as blinding agony shot through his broken wrist. Healey brought a heel down on his mouth, and the wail broke off as blood rushed over his tongue and choked him.

He blinked against the black spots flashing across his vision and stared up into the barrel of Healey’s gun, pointed steadily between his eyes.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” William shouted. “Gag him or shoot him or _something_.”

There was a joke about ball gags hovering at the edge of Clint’s memory, but he couldn’t quite get a hold on it. Everything in his head was vague and spinning, like he was watching the horizon from an endless tilt-a-whirl. The only clear thing was a recollection of his first morning in Phil’s apartment, waking up to warm skin and soft sheets.

When his life was put on the scales, now sooner than he’d like, his good deeds might not outweigh his sins, but at least he could say that he’d loved, that he’d given everything he had. Maybe that would buy him some mercy.

“Just get this asshole off my fucking boat,” William spat, scowling, and Healey gave a bland smile.

Clint expected a lot of things to happen, at that moment. He expected to get kicked again or shot or have his kneecaps broken. He expected to be shoved into the water where waves would drive him under. He expected to die, his body too wrecked and broken to fight.

He didn’t expect to see an arrow - _his_ arrow - come shooting over the rail and drive into Healey’s thigh.

Healey screamed, dropping to the deck, and Clint looked toward the rail to see a speed boat gliding across the water toward them, driven by the Black Widow, with Philip J. goddamn Coulson braced beside her, nocking another arrow.

Oh, _hell_ yes.

***

“Nice shot.”

“I was aiming for his head.”

The man holding the gun went down, and all eyes turned toward Phil as he drew back the bowstring for a second shot, praying that this was the kind of arrow he thought it was. Romanova snapped off two quick rounds as she steered one-handed, knocking another of the four men to the deck.

Phil could just see a shape lying on the deck, and he wouldn’t allow himself to believe that it was anything other than Clint, alive and fighting and ready for rescue. He loosed the arrow and watched it sail into the wall of the wheelhouse.

The force of the explosion rocked the yacht hard and sent the remaining two figures sprawling. Romanova fought to steady the little boat as waves kicked out across the water, and Phil readied himself to leap for the burning vessel.

“You got this?” Romanova asked, her voice carefully empty of anything but curiosity.

Phil gave her a nod. “I’ve got this.”

“Good luck.”

He jumped and caught hold of the yacht’s railing with one hand, gripping Clint’s bow in the other. He didn’t look back as Romanova sped away, and, he suspected, neither did she.

Phil hauled himself onto the rocking deck and rolled as a bullet gouged into the wood near his outstretched hand. He’d seen Clint come out of a fall with an arrow drawn in perfect form, but that skill was a lifetime in the making. Instead, he darted toward the burning wheelhouse, hoping that the smoke and fire would hide his movement.

He had the briefest glimpse of Clint, his face streaked with blood, lying bound and motionless beyond his reach.

One way or another, Phil decided, these men were going to burn.

He nocked another arrow and loosed as he came around the other side of the fire. The shot went wide, but it caught the gunman’s attention long enough for Phil to rush in and jab an arrow between his ribs. Phil jerked the arrow free in a spatter of gore and drew as he turned toward the last standing figure.

Three shots went off at once.

Clint’s arrow - because, even in Phil’s hands, it belonged to Clint - caught the side of the man’s face, tearing away a chunk of flesh and what looked like a sliver of eye. The bullet he was aiming at Phil’s heart was thrown off, casting wide across the water.

The third shot tore into Phil’s arm with enough force to send him spinning and crashing to the ground. The bow and arrow dropped from his hands, clattering useless across the deck, and the cry that came out of him as he fell tasted like desperation.

“God _dammit_! I have had it up to fucking _here_ with you motherfuckers.” The man was still standing, leaning against the railing with one hand pressed to the side of his ruined face. The other hand held a gun pointed shakily in Phil’s direction. He fired, but the bullet whizzed past, somewhere to Phil’s left. The other man - Healey, Phil now saw - was aiming his gun with more steadiness, the arrow still protruding from his thigh.

Clint had struggled, somehow, to his knees, and Phil was going to kill these men. He was going to end them, slowly, piece by piece, for what they had done.

He met Clint’s eyes, wide and desperate and so so blue, and gasped, “I’m here to rescue you.”

Clint coughed out a startled laugh. “Little short for a stormtrooper, sir.”

Phil would have laughed, would have smiled, would have said something, anything, to keep hearing Clint’s voice, but Healey fired off another shot that caught him high in the shoulder and knocked him flat. He heard an anguished shout and realized that it was Clint, cut off as the other man backhanded him with a bloody fist.

“This was supposed to be _easy_ ,” the man spat. “Quick exchange and back to business. So why the _fuck_ are these two assholes bleeding out on my boat, fucking things up?”

Clint must have given an answer, too low for Phil to hear over the waves and the fire, because the man whirled on him, jamming the gun between his teeth. A horrible, stricken sound came from Clint’s throat, and Phil’s stomach went cold.

He reached back with his good arm, scrambling to pull an arrow from the quiver as he climbed unsteadily to his knees. His other arm hung limp and useless at his side, throbbing with pain as blood streamed from the bullet holes. He didn’t know the arrows by feel, the way Clint did, but he knew the fletching was different for the trick arrows, adjusted for weight. His fingers closed around what he thought was the right one as Healey raised his gun, weakly, to take another shot.

Phil jabbed the arrowhead into the deck to activate and flung it in Healey’s direction, sending a thin arc of hydrochloric acid streaking through the air and straight into Healey’s face.

Healey’s wild, bloody scream caught the other man’s attention, and he turned, yanking the gun from Clint’s mouth and bringing it back around to Phil.

Phil’s brain was working at top speed, running through his mental inventory of Clint’s arrows. Was there another explosive? Another acid? Anything else he could use without the bow?

As fast as he could think, though, Clint would always be faster, would always reach the right conclusion with instinct before Phil could ever get there with reason, and Phil saw it click in Clint’s face half a second before Clint pushed himself up off the deck and barrelled straight into the last man, knocking both of them over the railing and into the water below.

***

The water was so cold, he couldn’t feel it.

All Clint knew was crushing numbness and the impact as something collided with his head.

He twisted around, looking for _up_ , looking for light, but he could barely see through the cloudy water and his own dizziness. He tried to kick, to make himself move in some direction, but his bound limbs were stiff and heavy.

Drowning was nothing like falling asleep. It was waking up screaming in reverse; it was being dragged thrashing out of wakefulness and back into the darkness of nightmare.

His bruised lungs ached and burned, and he felt himself sinking, the cold and dark closing in around him.

_My life is yours, and I want to share it with you._

When his life was put on the scales, at least he could say that Phil would mourn him, and that somehow carried more weight than every one of his sins.

Something closed hard around his arm, and Clint jerked around, flailing. Phil just held on tighter, and Clint blinked in disbelief.

He couldn’t see right. The water and pain were playing tricks on his eyes. Phil wouldn’t have been stupid enough to jump in after him.

But he had, he was there, and he wrapped an arm around Clint’s waist, struggling to propel them both upward, even as Clint’s dead weight dragged them both further down.

Clint elbowed Phil away, shaking his head. It wouldn’t work. Clint was bound, and Phil was injured, and this would end no other way than with both of them sinking to their deaths.

Phil grabbed for him, but Clint twisted away from his grip. Even in the murky water, he could make out the shape of anguish on Phil’s face, and he knew Phil wouldn’t leave him.

Dark spots formed on his eyes that had nothing to do with the water, and Clint knew he didn’t have long. He would pass out, soon. The muscles in his chest would give up their fight, and he would be flooded. He wouldn’t take Phil down with him.

_I’m sorry,_ he thought, and, this time, he knew what for.

Before Clint could open his mouth to take that last breath, Phil got an unshakable grip on his arm and slammed his foot into the bindings on Clint’s hands.

How Clint didn’t pass out, then, he never knew. He was sure that the force had snapped his hand off at the wrist, but it hurt too much to care. Whatever Phil had done, Clint’s injured hand was free, and Phil wrapped that arm around his neck, leaving both their unhurt arms out. 

Clint still didn’t know which way was up, but he followed Phil’s lead, pushing and kicking in a single direction until finally, _finally_ , sunlight punched through the darkness. The first breath he took as his head breached the surface made his throat sting, and he coughed into the waves crashing against his face.

The heaving of Phil’s shoulders under his arm made Clint feel, for the first time in days, as though there might be some safe places left in the world.

Between the two of them, they struggled back to the side of the yacht, and Phil slipped Clint’s injured arm carefully around one of the access rails leading up to the deck. He paused, just for a second, to look Clint in the eye, and Clint saw all the raw resolve and strength that he relied on.

“I’ll be right back,” Phil said, his voice hard and wrecked, and Clint could do nothing but nod.

Clint watched him climb slowly, one-handed, up the access rails and disappear onto the deck. He made himself breathe. Inhale, exhale. The waves knocked him against the rocking boat, and he clung to the rail, fighting the dizziness, numbness, pain, exhaustion, fear, and thousand other things that threatened to drag him back down into the water.

Phil was here. It would be okay.

Something big and orange dropped into the water next to him, and Clint watched it inflate into a neon emergency raft. He caught hold of a trailing strap and pulled the raft coser, slithering into it as Phil came back down the rails and climbed in beside him.

He leaned over Clint, his blue eyes sharp and searching, and, for a moment, there was nothing in the world but this, this shared look and the few small inches between them.

Phil opened his mouth to speak, closed it, swallowed, and tried again, like the words were fighting in his throat, like there was just too much to say.

Clint spit out a mouthful of seawater, tinted red with blood, and managed a thin, tired smile. “Hey,” he rasped.

The sound of Clint’s voice seemed to shake something loose in Phil’s chest, and he breathed, “Hey.” He swallowed. “Status?”

Of course. Assessment first. “Yellow,” Clint said. His throat felt scraped out, and it hurt to breathe. “Head, ribs, wrist, leg.”

Phil nodded, and there was no hiding the relief that crossed his face. “Blood loss?”

“Not much.” This was so easy, so familiar, and Clint could feel his adrenaline waning. “Gave me something. Drugs. Some kinda downer. Most of it’s gone.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “Okay, okay. Good.”

He was pale, shaking, blood soaking his shirt, and he looked suddenly lost. “Boss?” Clint said, and Phil looked at him, blinking. “You need to stop the bleeding in your arm.”

Phil stared down at the bullet holes in his jacket. “Oh. Yeah.”

By the time SHIELD arrived, the coast guard had descended on the scene, along with medical support and a sizeable perimeter of curious onlookers drawn by the explosion. 

Phil rallied enough to tell the authorities that he and Clint were government agents and Healey - still unconscious on the yacht - was a dangerous prisoner, and he give them a contact for verification. The only incident was a moment in which the paramedics tried to draw a curtain between them, and Clint felt a sudden stab of panic.

“If you take him out of my sight,” he said slowly, dangerously, picking his way through the thick fog in his brain, “I swear to god you won’t make it to retirement.”

Shortly thereafter, Clint descended into the sweet, empty sleep of a morphine drip, but Phil, at least, was still within reach.

***

The first thing Clint did once both of them were able to stand on their own and speak in clear sentences was to slap Phil across the face.

“What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?”

From the rage seething in Clint’s stare, Phil imagined he was lucky Clint hadn’t punched him. “I... what?”

“You went rogue,” Clint snapped. “You attacked another agent. You jumped in the English channel with a fucking bullet wound. You d- How could you be so _stupid_?”

Phil narrowed his eyes. “This is the conversation you want to have? About the stupidity of _my_ actions?”

“Well, they were pretty damn stupid,” Clint growled.

“You jumped off a roof. _Again_ ,” Phil shot back. “You disobeyed orders. You assisted an international fugitive. You allowed yourself to be captured carrying critical intelligence. You....”

“For the mission,” Clint cut him off. “Everything I did was for the mission. What you did? That was for _me_.”

“And?”

Clint gaped. “ _And?_ You could have died, you fucking jackass! You could have been executed. You _would_ have drowned. Jesus christ, Phil. You can’t just _do_ that shit.”

The painkillers in Phil’s system were still slowing him down, making it harder than usual to track Clint’s line of thought. “Let me see if I understand this. You’re not angry because I put myself in danger, which I do every day, I might add. You’re angry because I did it for _you_?”

“Yes.” Clint shook his head. “It’s one thing if it’s for the job. You turned on SHIELD to come after me, and that’s....”

“That’s what?” He ducked down, trying to catch Clint’s eye and hoping he wouldn’t get slapped again. “Excessive? Unacceptable? Terrifying?” Clint met his gaze and said nothing. “What would you have done? What would you do?”

The anger in his blue eyes flickered, and, after a moment, the corner of his mouth curled up. “Pretty much the same thing.”

Phil returned his smile. “That’s what I thought.”

“You two just about done?” Fury called from the hallway. “You got about ten seconds to make-out before I need your asses in this debriefing.”

Phil sighed, and Clint rolled his eyes. “Fuck off, sir,” Clint answered.

“I know where you sleep, Barton,” Fury replied, but he gave them another full minute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A year ago today, the words " _Barton's been compromised_ " dropped onto the internet, and a small corner of a large fandom collectively lost its shit. At the time, I was holding my breath and flailing along with everyone else and slowly wading deeper into a silly little story that would become "Fifty Pound Draw".
> 
> A year later, that silly little story has turned into a silly little series, and the full-length sequel reaches its conclusion. An epilogue and coda will follow tomorrow, but I want to take a moment to wish a happy anniversary to C/C fandom and to say thank you.
> 
> To everyone who's been reading since the beginning - especially coffeesuperhero and notthatheroine - thank you. THANK YOU. _THANK YOU_. I don't know why you're still here, but I'm glad you are. To those just jumping on now: Welcome! We're pretty nice around here, so have a seat, pick a story, and dig in. Thank all of you for your kudos, your extraordinary comments, and your wonderful feedback. I really do love everyone in this bar.
> 
> I hope you continue to stick around, because there's plenty more to come.
> 
> Ok, sentimental moment over. Go on about your business.
> 
> -shadowen


	5. Epilogue: Six Months Later

Healey gave up everything on his employer without much persuasion. Clint heard, though it was never confirmed, that all Fury did was threaten to let Coulson take a crack at him, and the names, places, and details just came pouring out.

William Cross, weapons dealer specializing in large shipments of low-grade arms, part-time smuggler, and generally unpleasant asshole who occasionally dabbled in kidnapping, extortion, and terrorism. His endgame, Healey claimed, was to stir up as much trouble as possible for the express purpose, obviously, of selling more guns.

That struck Clint as a fairly unsustainable strategy, but no one asked for his opinion until SHIELD’s investigation into Cross’s empire turned up something else.

“A webcam feed picked her up outside a cafe in Thessaloniki,” Hill said, sliding the tablet in front of Clint. In the corner of the screen was a grainy, unfocused image, cropped to focus on a shockingly beautiful woman with unmistakable red hair. “We’re assembling a team to move in, now. Any insight you can give them would be helpful.”

Clint looked from the tablet up to Hill. “Insight?”

She nodded. “You’re the only asset we know who’s had direct contact with the Black Widow. This is our best chance to take her down, and first-hand knowledge could make a difference.”

Clint snorted, raising an eyebrow in Fury’s direction. “You’re kidding, right?” He looked to Phil, who was absorbing the proceedings with a mask of placid interest. “She’ll see a team coming a mile away and rabbit. And if they do manage to get close enough for contact, she’ll kill them and disappear.”

“That’s pretty pessimistic,” Fury remarked, and Clint frowned.

“It’s realistic,” he replied, turning back to Hill. “You want my insight? Here it is: She’s good, better than anyone we’ve got, and, more to the point, she’s not a threat. She doesn’t give one fuck about SHIELD or global security or whatever. She’s just looking out for herself.”

Fury gave him a hard scowl. “Well, I’d say that makes her pretty damn dangerous.”

“Not to us,” Clint said. “Unless you want to throw a bunch of agents at her, in which case, yeah, she’ll be fucking dangerous.”

“Barton,” Hill said, warning. “Her skill set makes her a threat as long as she remains at large. This team is going in with or without your consultation, so if you want to help those agents stay alive, I suggest you start making recommendations.”

_Recommendations._ That was an awfully innocuous word for telling them how to kill someone who’d helped save his life. He thought of her cool hands and her tired eyes and the tight sounds of pain as he dug the bullet out of her shoulder. Taking a deep breath, he told Hill evenly, “I’ll go.”

“What?” Phil had been silent beside him through the whole briefing, and now his voice was sharp and startled.

“I’ll go,” Clint repeated. “She knows me. She’ll let me get close, or at least close enough to take a shot.”

“Close enough for her to take a shot at you,” Fury said darkly.

Clint shrugged. “I’ve got a better chance than anyone else, and I’m the only specialist with a comparable skill set.”

Hill and Fury exchanged a look, and Fury turned to Phil. “Coulson?”

Phil’s eyes flickered up to Clint, just for a second, like he needed that glance to get his bearings. “I think if you weren’t prepared to take Agent Barton’s recommendation,” he told Fury, “then you shouldn’t have asked for it.”

Fury gave him a sour glare and sighed. “Did medical clear you?” he asked Clint.

“Two weeks ago.”

Turning back to Phil, he said, “I assume you’re gonna tag along on this little adventure.”

“I think Agent Barton should be granted operation authority on this mission,” Phil replied. “But I would like to coordinate, if he agrees.”

Clint looked up sharply and thought, for one strange moment, that Phil must be kidding, but Phil met his gaze with calm, patient certainty. “Yeah, of course,” Clint said, flashing him a smile. “Wouldn’t take anyone else.”

Hill made a face like she was trying not to sigh. “Fine. Your team specs are in the briefing file. Wheels up in twelve hours.”

They were in transit inside of eight hours with a light team and a streamlined mission plan that involved, much to Phil’s disapproval, a direct infiltration of Romanova’s lodgings on Clint’s part.

“If I’d known you were going to abuse your authority, I wouldn’t have told them to put you in charge.”

“No take-backs,” Clint said, grinning, and Phil rolled his eyes.

At Clint’s direction, the team took up positions around the small, quiet guesthouse overlooking the coast, checking in as they got settled, and he and Phil made a circuit of the block, checking sightlines and cover. Phil would provide ground support, monitoring the op from the car, ready to intervene if Clint got into trouble.

“ _Ready at your signal, Hawkeye,_ ” Bishop chimed over the comm as Phil pulled up in front of the guest house.

“Alright, folks, sit tight and cross your fingers.” Clint looked to Phil. “Green?”

Phil hesitated, and Clint knew that Phil hesitating at the start of a mission was never _ever_ a good thing. After a moment, Phil reached up and pulled the comm out of his ear, gesturing for Clint to do the same.

“Whatever you’re thinking of doing,” he said, quiet and serious. “Don’t.”

“You know the plan,” Clint told him. “You know wh-”

“I know the plan, and I know you’re not going to stick to it.” He tilted toward Clint, like he wanted to lean in, like he was fighting the impulse to reach out. “Clint, she’s dangerous, whatever you might think. Just because she helped you once doesn’t....”

Clint didn’t fight it. He curled his hand around the back of Phil’s neck and brushed a thumb over his ear. “Hey,” he said. “You trust me?”

Phil frowned. “Of course I do.”

“So trust me.”

“Clint, _please_.”

“Trust me.” He gave Phil a reassuring smile as he pulled away and slipped the comm back into his ear, ignoring the way his heart was pounding with apprehension. “Moving in now,” he said to the team at large. “We’re officially on the clock.”

He could feel Phil’s eyes on his back as he walked away from the car and into the guesthouse.

There were reservations under one of his old aliases, abandoned before he’d gotten caught up with SHIELD, and Clint checked in without incident. His room was next to Romanova’s, and it was altogether too easy to make the jump from his window ledge to hers and carefully work open the lock on her window.

One of the agents gave a low whistle over the comm. “ _Hell of an entrance, sir._ ”

“ _Don’t encourage him,_ ” Phil replied, and Clint grinned to himself in the dark.

He locked the window behind him and went from there to a side table to a nightstand to the bed, setting charges as he went, never touching the floor. Finally, he made the full circuit and dropped into a desk chair beside the window to wait.

She’d know he was there, probably before she ever came into the room, but surprise wasn’t really the point.

“ _No sign of Widow._ ” Phil’s voice on the comm was steady and soothing, something to anchor Clint as he waited. “ _Operating conditions stable. No change in traffic._ ”

“ _Point side’s clear_ ,” Bishop confirmed. She’d have her scope aimed at Romanova’s window, with eyes on the room and the side entrance to the building.

The other agents affirmed the all-clear as Clint sat in silence, listening and waiting.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The door opened without a sound, and confusion erupted on the comm.

“ _Contact_ ,” Bishop said. “ _Widow’s in the room._ ”

“ _What? Where did she come from?_ ”

“ _Did anyone mark her approach?_ ”

“ _Quiet._ ” Phil’s command cut through the chatter. “ _She slipped our watch. This is Agent Barton’s show, now._ ”

If he was unsure, there was no hint of it, and Clint breathed deep.

Romanova paused and didn’t quite close the door behind her, leaving the lights off.

“Hawkeye.”

“Widow.”

“I’d invite you to sit, but....” 

“Yeah, sorry,” Clint said. “I went ahead and made myself at home. Didn’t know how long you’d be.”

“Long enough for you to get agents in place, apparently.”

In his ear, one of the agents swore and was quickly silenced by a word from Phil.

“My bosses are kinda paranoid,” Clint told her. “I told them you weren’t so bad.”

She folded her arms and gave him an amused look. “I’m pretty bad, actually.”

“Maybe.”

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “Because your bosses think I’m a bad person?”

Through the dark, Clint looked her in the eye and said, “I’m here to kill you.”

She didn’t flinch, didn’t react, and the silence on the comm was deafening. “Well,” she said evenly. “I certainly appreciate your honesty.”

“Tell you the truth, though, that’s really my second choice.” Clint sat forward in the chair, holding her gaze. “The way I see it, there’s four ways this can end.”

Maneuvering carefully in sight of the window, Romanova sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs. “I’m listening.”

“One, everything goes to plan, and you get carried out of here in a body bag.” He kept his eyes on her face, but he watched her hands. “Two, you kill me and run, and SHIELD keeps right on chasing you.” Clint let his voice go hard and said, “And before you start thinking that sounds like a good option, I want you to think about my partner. You remember Agent Coulson, right?”

She nodded. “I remember.”

“Right. So you think about him, about what he did to get me back, and you just imagine what he’ll do to you if I don’t make it out of this room.”

Something like a smile flickered on her red lips, the slightest change in the shadows on her face. “Option two is suddenly less appealing,” she admitted. “I assume Agent Coulson is listening to this conversation?”

Clint nodded just as Phil said in a warning tone, “ _Careful, Hawkeye._ ”

“He says hi.”

Romanova did smile, then. “Alright. So your first two scenarios end with one of us dead. I’ve got to say I’m not really sold on that idea.”

“Neither am I,” Clint agreed. “Especially since option two would result in SHIELD sending more agents for you to kill, including my partner. Which is why option three is that I blow the charges you’re pretending not to notice, and this whole shitshow ends right here.”

He heard an intake of breath over the comm, and one of the agents remarked, “ _That’s a hell of a bluff_.”

“ _He’s not bluffing,_ ” Bishop replied. “ _I saw him set the charges. They’re live._ ”

Phil’s voice was so quiet, Clint barely heard it. “ _Don’t you dare._ ”

“You’re just sunshine and rainbows, aren’t you,” Romanova said, and Clint gave her a cold smile.

“So let’s talk about door number four.”

“Which is?”

“Come back with me.”

This time, it was Phil who swore.

Romanova blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Come with me. Come work for SHIELD,” Clint said. “The hours suck, and I’m pretty sure you’d be taking a pay cut. But the benefits aren’t bad, and most of the people are alright.”

She looked at him like she thought his brain might be leaking out of his ears. “First of all, why in the name of sanity would you possibly think I’d want to work for SHIELD? Second, why should I believe your fellow agents will do anything other than shoot me the second I leave this building?”

“Both good questions. Pretty sure I asked the same thing when they came knocking,” Clint said. “The answer to the second question is: because I’m telling you they won’t, and you know what my word’s worth.”

“I’m not questioning your word.” The tension in her had changed from guarded to suspicious, listening hard for the lie in Clint’s promises. “But I doubt you have the authority to make this kind of offer.”

“Not even a little bit,” Clint confirmed. “I’ll stand by it, though, and I’m make sure they do, too.”

She frowned. “That’s a pretty thin guarantee.”

“On my life.”

“I’ve seen what your life’s worth to them,” she said.

“Fair enough. But my partner’s out there, and you’ve seen what it’s worth to him, too,” Clint replied. Romanova hesitated, and he added, “You can take me as a hostage, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“It might.”

“Fine with me.”

“ _Jesus Christ._ ” Phil sounded like he’d had just about enough of this conversation.

“As far as question one,” Clint went on. “You want to work for SHIELD because you don’t want to be a bad guy.”

She gave him a curious look, genuine and clear. “What makes you say that?”

“Because you don’t. You just do what you have to to survive,” he answered simply. “You wanna work for SHIELD because you want a chance to live, and because you wanna be in control of your life for once.”

“ _Barton._ ” Phil knew what he was doing, knew how much of his heart he was laying out, and he knew how easily Romanova could use that against him.

“Being a weapon for SHIELD doesn’t sound much like being in control,” she said.

“So don’t be a weapon.” Clint unslung the bow from his shoulder, holding it out so that light from the window glinted off it’s careful curves. “You know why I use this? Why I don’t just carry a gun like everyone else?”

“I had wondered,” she admitted, pursing her lips.

“Because it’s mine. Because shooting it means something to me that nobody else can understand or take away, and it reminds me that I’m where I am because of the choices I made. They can give me all the goddamn orders they want, but I’m the one who decides what I do.” Clint turned the bow upward so that the grip sat it in his hand the way it was made to. “ _This_ is a weapon. I’m a guy with a good aim, and these assholes pay me to shoot stuff.”

For a long moment, Romanova stared at him in silence. Then, smiling, she said, “You must be very popular with your superiors.”

Clint laughed. “In the interest of full disclosure, probably ninety percent of the other agents I know can’t stand me, including the brass. So you might not wanna sit with me in the lunchroom.”

Her face didn’t move, the friendly smile still curling on her face, and her voice was warm as she purred, “I could kill you before you have time to trip the charges and be out of that window and on the street before your backup knows what’s happened.”

“ _Agents, stand-by_.” The ambient sounds of Phil’s voice changed, and Clint knew he was in the guest house, moving up to take position outside Romanova’s door. He would burst through it the moment he thought Clint was in danger.

“You could try,” Clint said. His pulse rattled in his ears, knowing just how thin a rope he was walking.

Romanova stood slowly, stalking toward him with graceful, measured steps. “You think you can take me?”

Clint stayed seated. He didn’t flinch and forced himself to breathe as she came to loom over him. “Probably not,” he admitted. “But you better fucking believe I’m gonna go down fighting.”

“ _She’s in my sights,_ ” Bishop said in his ear. “ _Repeat. I’ve got a clear line on Widow._ ”

“ _Your call, Barton_ ,” Phil told him in the mild, flat tone that Clint knew meant he was holding something down. “ _Say the word._ ”

Clint just looked Romanova straight in the eye and asked, “What’s it gonna be, Natalia?”

Romanova smiled. “I’ve been a lot of things,” she said. “Maybe now it’s time to be an agent of SHIELD.”

Clint gave her his brightest grin in reply. “Agents, stand down. We’re coming out.”

Phil’s sigh was loud in his ear. “ _When we get home...._ ”

“Yeah, yeah,” Clint cut him off. He wasn’t really interested in any part of that sentence beyond _home_.


	6. Form P178-44R

Form P178-44R: **Official Notice of Intent to Cohabitate**

To be completed in triplicate and submitted to the approving officers listed under TERMS OF COHABITATION. Approval is not granted until this form has been approved by all parties and processed by the Department of Human Resources.

Date of Notice: June 30, 2008

SECTION A: COHABITANTS

**NOTICE SUBMITTED BY**  
NAME:  COULSON, PHILIP J.  
ID: VI-619  
D.O.B.: 07-08-1970  
DESIGNATION: FIELD AGENT - OP COORD.  
CLEARANCE: 7  
HR REF: PD-727 P-IL  
LISTED TENANT [X]

**COHABITANT**  
NAME:  BARTON, CLINTON F.  
ID: RO-919  
D.O.B.: 03-21-1979  
DESIGNATION: FIELD AGENT - SPECIALIST  
CLEARANCE: 6C  
HR REF: PD-447 G-IA

 

SECTION B: PROPERTY

**PROPERTY TYPE**  
UNIT [X] 

**ADDRESS:** [REDACTED]

If the PROPERTY OWNER is not one of the listed cohabitating S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel, attach form P178-43SR.

**PROPERTY SECURITY** \- Check all that apply.  
PRE-EXISTING ALERT SYSTEM [X]  
S.H.I.E.L.D. STANDARD ALERT SYSTEM [X]  
ON-SITE SECURITY PERSONNEL [X]  
PRE-EXISTING SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM [X]  
S.H.I.E.L.D. STANDARD SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM [X]  
OTHER/ADDITIONAL SECURITY [X] (To be described in attached document.)

**PROPERTY ACCESS** \- Check all that apply.  
STANDARD KEY [X]  
ACCESS CARD [X]  
DIGITAL KEY [X]  
BIOMETRIC [X]  
\--For STANDARD KEY, specify number of locks:  5  
\--For DIGITAL KEY, specify TYPE:  
\----ALTERNATING CODE [X]  
\--For ALTERNATING CODE, specify FREQUENCY:  
\----MONTH [X]  
\--For BIOMETRIC, specify TYPE:  
\----PRINT - PALM [X]  
\----VOICE [X]  
\----DNA [X]  
\----OTHER/ADDITIONAL ACCESS MEASURES [X] (To be described in attached document.)

Will all cohabitants be granted full property access?  
YES [X]  
If NO, attach Form P178-44SA.

 

SECTION C: RELATIONSHIP

**NATURE OF RELATIONSHIP OF COHABITANTS** \- Check all that apply.  
PROFESSIONAL [X]  
SEXUAL [X] 

**DESCRIPTION OF RELATIONSHIP**  
Agents Coulson and Barton act as a partner unit, though Agent Coulson retains operational authority. Sexual relationship began 11-13-2007. Commitment is permanent.

All cohabitants must schedule individual and combined meetings with a designated S.H.I.E.L.D. psychiatric analyst. If one or more cohabitants have already been assigned a S.H.I.E.L.D. psychiatric caseworker, the cohabitation review must be conducted by a different analyst. Form P178-44R may not be processed without a cohabitation review on file.

**ADDITIONAL COMMENTS BY COHABITANTS**  
[note in Clint's handwriting] "this is stupid"

 

TERMS OF COHABITATION

Consenting personnel may establish long-term cohabitation on premises outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities, provided the following terms are met:

1\. The cohabitants submit official notice of intent to cohabitate, fulfilled by Form P178-44R.  
2\. Cohabitation does not violate S.H.I.E.L.D. security policies, described in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT document, Section C, Subsection iv, and Section M, Subsections iii and x.  
3\. The property in which the cohabitants intend to reside meets S.H.I.E.L.D. location security standards, described in the S.H.I.E.L.D. OPERATIONS MANUAL Section D.  
4\. Cohabitation does not interfere with any established and future professional relationships, ongoing and future mission parameters, or the general daily operations of S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities.  
5\. Cohabitation is not detrimental to the physical or psychological well-being of the cohabitants or any other S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel.  
6\. Cohabitation is approved by the following officers:  
i. the immediate departmental or regional Director(s)  
ii. the Director of Personnel  
iii. the Director of Psychiatry and Psychology  
iv. the cohabitants’ immediate superior(s). If the cohabitants report to the same superior officer and/or one cohabitant acts as official superior to another, no additional approval is required.

The undersigned state that they acknowledge and agree to the terms specified above and understand that violation of these terms may result in an order to terminate cohabitation. The undersigned acknowledge that the circumstances of cohabitation may be reviewed at any time, in the event that a report of concern is filed by a departmental director or other officer of sufficient station.

 

SIGNATURE: PHILIP J. COULSON  
DATE: 6-28-2008

 

SIGNATURE: CLINTON F. BARTON  
DATE: 6-29-08

 

Pending approval, cohabitation will begin on: 08-13-2008


End file.
